Synthetic Ivory

A girl invites a friend to play with her Barbie house, they sit together on the carpet and choose the dolls and the clothes, arranging the rooms in
the house, the furniture and items. They each hold a doll in her hand, and conduct a grown-up women’s conversation derived from the two young
girls’ minds. The created situations mix sentences they heard from grown-up women in reality or on television alongside the girls’ imagination,
allowing them to play “being a grown-up woman”.
The doll outlines the narrative – what is a home, what is a body, what is a family, which roles one can assume in the social sphere and in world of
employment – what is a grown-up life. From the day of her launch on March 1959 by Mattel company, Barbie was marketed as a “teenage fashion
model”. She premiered on a television add during the Micky Mouse Club show that targeted a young audience. The commercial shows
white-skinned blond and brunette dolls, as they stand on a staircase and the atmosphere is reminiscent of a fashion show or beauty pageant.
In the background a song written speci cally for the commercial plays:
“Barbie you're beautiful
You make me feel my Barbie doll is really real
Barbie's small and so petite,
Her clothes and  gure look so neat
Her dancing out ts ring some bells
At parties she will cast a spell
Purses, hats, and gloves galore
And all the gadgets gals adore.
Someday, I'm going to be exactly like you
Till then I know just what I'll do…
Barbie, beautiful Barbie I'll make believe that I am you.”
The song explains very well the marketing directors’ intent to create a certain ideal of femininity alongside the desire to emulate the doll – Barbie is
beautiful, petite, with a well put together look, she is a magnetizing star and she has all the clothes items and accessories that girls love.
The song is delivered from the mouth of a little girl who owns a Barbie doll, and she concludes it with the hope that one day she will be just like
Barbie, and until that blissful day arrives, she knows what she has to do to – pretend she is the doll, that is, to play at what my mature life will be
when I grow up.
The person who had envisioned Barbie was Ruth Handler, who was married to an executive at Mattel. She saw her daughter play with paper dolls
and assign them grown-up women’s roles. At the time, most dolls were representations of infants, and Handler recognized a gap in the market that
could be  lled, and named the dolls after her daughter, Barbie (Barbara), and her son, Ken (Kenneth). From an economical perspective she surely
made the right move. In spite of criticism regarding Barbie’s body structure from the moment of her launch, 350,000 dolls were sold during the
 rst year of her launch, and soon she became a cultural symbol. In 2006 over a billion dolls were reportedly sold in approximately 150 countries
and three dolls are sold every second around the world. On the one hand, with her family and friends, the houses, the clothes and accessories, the
Barbie dolls answered the need of many girls and boys who were looking for a mature doll with which they could identify, perceive as an ideal and
develop imaginative individual and group games, and have the ability to play “being grown-up” and stage through the doll real or imagined
situations. On the other hand, from the moment it was born the doll was associated with an idealization of a misleading and even dangerous body
image. According to doctors, if Barbie was a real woman she would have been underweight and su ering an acute lack of body fat percentage.
The fact that the dolls came only in the form of a white and primarily blonde woman led to much criticism. Over the years, Hispanic, Black, Asian,
tall and short dolls appeared, as well as dolls with other body structures alongside a variety of out ts suitable for holidays and special days in
di erent cultures. An attempt to address criticism and reach out to a wider audience led by a decline in sales. Even though today the Barbie brand
o ers over twenty-two skin tones, thirteen eye colors, and  ve body shapes she remains mainly identi ed with an impossible body structure, blue
eyes, and long blonde hair.
At the time of the construction of the “Synthetic Ivory” exhibition, Netta Dror took her friends and herself back to that shared childhood days’ game
on the carpet. She asked, “who wants to come and play with the Barbies with me” only this time as mature people. Dror’s choice to o er an
unmediated game space soon turned out to have a magical ability to raise the ways the doll activates ingrained mechanisms and a desire to create
alternative narratives that the participants did not know as children or felt were against dictum and ideal. The reunion with the doll was like
pressing a button that  ooded the implicit strain in the relationship with a doll that is neither woman nor child – questions that were suppressed
for some and overt for others – should I bring myself closer to the doll regarding appearance and lifestyle or is there an option that the doll will
come closer to me. Today, as mature people, the players knew they will not be just like Barbie one day as the advertising songs suggested, because
“one day” is already here and these are the people they became. Some still wish to be like her, love or even sanctify her, while others reject her
image completely, despise or disdain her. without exception, whoever received the invitation approached the opportunity to create whatever scene
they choose with a liberating joy mixed with trepidation. In accordance with the players’ desire and imagination, some chose to simulate the
mundane and others took the opportunity to create dark and even grotesque images. Thus, the invitation to a game, which commenced as an
experimental move and without clear guidance, turned into a therapeutic action that balanced the dissonance between the doll’s status as an
elevated and even sacred object and the various di erent life experiences.
The exhibition space combines elevated hovering elements, most of the situations move and swirl in a manner reminiscent of a mobile sculpture, a
system of moving parts that rotate around themselves and move together like one machine. At the center of the space one house is stationed on
an elevated pedestal that creates a kind of shrine. The constructed space allows visitors to return to the child’s perspective through which they
experienced the doll, inviting them to reconsider it and the meeting points between their lives and the narratives the doll brings with her.