The idea to create 175 glass candies came to me during the war, while I was staying in a shelter in Nahariya, where the glass workshop is located. Amid the deafening sounds of Iron Dome interceptions and ambulance sirens, in that confined space, my eyes caught sight of three sweet little girls, each holding a lollipop. The sweetness of their candies was enough to persuade them to go down into the shelter.
175 glass candies, each candy is wrapped in glass-cellophane, containing within it an amorphous intimidating object, resembling a virus, also made of glass - a crystalline echo of threat.
That small and incidental moment led my thoughts to an iconic sculptural installation: the pile of candies by the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres (1957–1996). Through that work, González-Torres mourned, in a subtle and poetic way, the loss of his partner Ross to the AIDS epidemic. His protest against the Reagan administration’s indifference to the AIDS crisis reverberates with another time, another conflict, other regimes. Sweetened hypocrisy wrapped in cellophane, enclosing opacity and brutality. How does one measure the value of life? By its sweetness? By its absence?
175 Candies, 2024–2025
Glass
2 × 2 × 10 cm
Produced at the glass workshop of Yuri Stepanov