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Ruth Beraha’s Chanukkiah is a sound-based work that assumes the visual form of a spider: eight legs corresponding to eight amplified speakers, through which the crackling of a fire is heard, and a central woofer occupying the position of the shamash.

The sound remains alive, open and cyclical. A first flame seems to ignite from a single speaker; gradually, the others join in. The fire intensifies, reaches its peak, subsides, and begins again. Rather than representing fire visually, the work evokes it through sound, activating the viewer’s imagination and inviting an act of mental projection.

The work emerges from the tension between the iconoclastic dimension of Jewish culture and the persistent attraction to images that characterizes Beraha’s practice. The absence of a visible flame does not signify absence; instead, it creates a space in which each viewer constructs an individual image of fire.

The spider is an archetypal and primordial figure, at once enigmatic and unsettling. Its eight limbs evoke the generative power of weaving, while simultaneously suggesting entanglement, enclosure and the condition of being caught within a web.

The title refers to a song by Molly Drake from the 1950s and introduces the work’s central metaphor: the possibility that the same experience may be remembered in radically different ways by two people whose perspectives cannot be reconciled. One remembers the light; the other remembers the smoke.

The work therefore addresses the impossibility of a single, definitive truth and turns instead toward questions of perception, memory and identity. Within this framework, Jewish identity becomes not a fixed category but a lived and continually renegotiated experience—particularly in a historical moment in which being Jewish