Einat Leader - Wax Pit Birds

Miniatures offer changes of scale by which we measure ourselves anew. On one hand, miniatures posit an omniscient onlooker, able to take in the whole at once. Consider your self in relation to dollhouses, snow globes…souvenir keychains you look through to see a picture of the very spot you’re visiting, stilled. You are large enough to hold such things fully in hand. You obtain all the space around it. On the other hand, miniatures compel us to transcend spatial norms, issue invitations to their realm, and suggest we forget or disregard our size…

Miniatures encourage attention – in the way whispering requires a listener to quiet down and incline toward the speaker. Sometimes we need binoculars, microscopes, view-masters, to assist our looking, but mediated or not, miniatures suggest there is more there than meets the eye easily. (Lia Purport, On Looking, 2006).

In House of Measures, Einat Leader, a jeweller and scholar in the field of craft and metalwork, constructs a delicate yet piercing microcosm of objects that engage the evocative power of the miniature and the emotional resonance of the souvenir. Drawing on their ability to condense time, space, custom, and memory into tactile forms, her works unfold into a textured meditation on architecture, loss, and historical reckoning.

The exhibition’s title acts as a compressed framework in itself. Most clearly, it refers to the building that now houses the Museum on the Seam — a well-proportioned, once-grand family villa built in the early 1930s by Palestinian architect Andoni Baramki, a leading figure in Jerusalem’s architectural landscape during the British Mandate; a house whose fate — like that of many others — became entangled in the story of dispossession and displacement following 1948. Yet the title also reverberates with irony and critique: it alludes to the measures taken — or conspicuously avoided — to confront the issue of “abandoned” Palestinian property; to the flawed moral metrics and double standards that sustain historical erasure and denial; and to the disproportionate, incalculable scale of loss and devastation that mark the present moment.

In the museum space, Leader presents a collection of keepsakes and jewellery, displayed in vitrines reminiscent of archaeological showcases or nestled within makeshift “gutters” and pipe-like structures assembled from shards of broken jars — a fragile, exposed anatomy of the house. Through these pieces, she conjures the building’s repressed past alongside its present state of unhomeliness: once a family residence whose inhabitants became “absentees,” its openings sealed, and its function repeatedly repurposed in response to shifting political forces and historical tides.

At the heart of the installation lies a key metonym: a pendant-keychain designed by the artist in the shape of the building’s signature arched windows. Where reinforced concrete once stood, Leader inserts a sliver of grey wax — soft, pliable, and impermanent — a material that serves simultaneously as a portable memorial candle and a poignant yet defiant gesture toward repair and hope. Other articles, including a group of decorative items, kitchenware, and tools crafted from an old inherited carpet, take the form of talismans, totems, or teraphim — ancient household protectors — that recall the lost domestic setting. Still others, like bird-shaped brooches made of olive pits, or tiny wooden camels in a touristic Orientalist style typical of the Old City, invoke the cultural and political terrain of the region, and the contested layers of its symbolism and trade.

Though steeped in melancholy, Leader’s mementoes do not offer the comfort of nostalgia, nor do they naïvely attempt to restore a lost past. As essayist Susan Stewart observes in her book On Longing (1993): “Whether the souvenir is a material sample or not, it will still exist as a sample of the now distanced experience, an experience which the object can only evoke and resonate with, and can never entirely recoup.” Distorted, dysfunctional, corroded with rust, tar, and feathers — or echoing apparatuses of surveillance and control — these are not sentimental relics, but critical artefacts, suggesting a fractured and traumatic reality. And yet their scale remains human, their intimacy intact: meant to be worn, held, and carried, they function as mnemonic tokens or as minor gestures of recognition and resistance.

Leader’s practice refuses monumentality. Instead, her minute creations invite touching and close looking, as if asking the viewer to stoop down and peer inward. Within these compact and intricate objects, a quiet insistence emerges: that memory is both political and intimate, and that the smallest forms can hold the heaviest truths. Echoing the principles of proportion that govern both architecture and ethics, House of Measures becomes not only a site of reflection, but also a calibrating system by which to examine the weight of history, the contours of loss, and the enduring need for accountability.