Confessional

Confessional is a site-responsive performance and installation developed during the “Institute for Freedom Research” residency at Studiobank, Tel Aviv, and realized at the 2021 MusraraMix Festival in Jerusalem. The work takes the structure of the Catholic confessional as its point of departure—not as a religious rite, but as a psychosomatic technology: a mechanism by which internalized shame and guilt might be externalized and somatically released through speech.

Informed by research into theology, trauma studies, and somatic psychology, Ree’s iteration of the confessional reframes it as a space of both individual reflection and political interrogation. Visitors to the festival were invited to respond to a single prompt: “How am I a participant in my own subjugation?”—a question mirroring the festival’s curatorial theme of “liberation.” Confessions were submitted anonymously and, every hour, ritualistically collected, cleansed, and read aloud by the artist via megaphone into the surrounding public space.

The performance took place in Musrara, a neighborhood marked by layered historical and political tensions. The festival was hosted by an Israeli art institution located in a building that was once a Palestinian family’s home—imbuing the piece with an unspoken but unavoidable charge. The irony of an Israeli state-funded institution staging a “freedom research” festival in such a context was not lost on the artist. Confessional became, intentionally or not, a provocation: what does it mean to speak about liberation from within the architecture of dispossession? What happens when ritual meets rupture?

This tension was made explicit when the school’s director, unaware of the performance’s nature, intervened during one of the public megaphone readings. Citing neighborhood disturbance, the director insisted the reading be halted—an act that exposed the tightly drawn boundaries of institutional tolerance. Here, the performance became a live test: what are the conditions under which freedom is sanctioned, and what happens when those limits are pushed?

For Ree, this encounter with boundary and contradiction was not only political, but deeply personal. The location—just steps from the Old City—was where, nearly fifteen years earlier, they had studied at a religious seminary. It was in that place that a profound rupture of faith catalyzed a departure from Orthodox Judaism, and with it, a long process of reorienting meaning, belief, and identity. Returning to this site, on the eve of leaving Israel permanently, Confessional marked a cyclical closure: a re-encounter with faith, not to reclaim it, but to transform it.

In this way, the work mirrors the artist’s own spiritual and political evolution—from submission to questioning, from containment to resistance. It reflects a practice shaped by crossing thresholds: from religious orthodoxy to personal spirituality; from national ideology to critical distance; from institutional compliance to artistic defiance.

Confessional thus became both method and metaphor—a mechanism for collective release and a personal rite of exit. It offered participants a space to offload inherited burdens, while enacting a subtle confrontation with the systems that produce them. In form and in context, it asked: how far can we stretch the frame of liberation before it snaps? And what might be possible in the space that breaking opens?