Ketubah: Family contracts
Brooke Borg
Ketubah: Family contracts
In the Jewish tradition, a ketubah is an integral marriage contract that details the rights and obligations of the bride and groom. Brooke Borg’s project develops the artistic potential of this format while she also uses it as a device to describe and analyse intimate life. A series of panels, complemented by a video, show us the implicit aspects of private relationships: the secret tensions, the silent negotiations and the eternal need for reconciliation. When breaking down and legalising diverse family problems and complaints, the artist takes on the role of the devil’s advocate, transferring family arguments from the private arena into a coded, formal dimension. In this way, she analyses and questions the politics of contemporary privacy, inviting us to reflect upon instances and protocols that make up our relational experience.
Borg’s work occurs at the point where intimacy and legalism meet, as Nagisa Oshima’s film In the Realm of the Senses celebrated, or Ronald Dworkin’s book Law’s Empire. The idea of a legal basis for intimacy casts doubt on the concept of the home and its dynamics as a space free from institutional forces. In turn, it presents an original variation on a key character of emotional capitalism: the affective mediator. The intervention of a mediator can help solve, but also punish, because it personifies competence in family matters understood as a specialised technique. Divided into two figures – subjective and objective, member of the family and guardian of the law – the artist unfolds the double dimension, autobiographic and official, of the cause of private life.
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