The poets Forough Farrokhzad and Dalia Rabikovitz never met, yet two things connect them. The first is the director Ebrahim Golestan, the man with whom both had a relationship, and the second is a poem they each wrote with the same title, Mechanized Doll. Farrokhzad, who lived in 1960s Iran, wrote in her poem about the female psyche and how it is controlled by the rules of the male-dominated world, trapped within a body that functions like a shell. Rabikovitz wrote about the experience of following the path and conforming to societal norms. Both poets created from experiences of suffering and emotional wounds caused by contact with a closed and alienating society. In the exhibition Mechanized Doll, two women appear, who also never met. One was forced to emigrate from Iran to Israel following the revolution, returned to religious observance, and moved to a Haredi Ashkenazi neighborhood in Jerusalem. As part of her migration process, she actively imitates her past, including cutting out old photographs of herself and keeping her life story a closely guarded secret. The second figure in the exhibition is a young woman living in a kibbutz in the Galilee who is undergoing gender transition, while dealing with the way her immediate environment reacts to her. Anne Simin Shitrit works as a researcher. At her mother’s home in Mea Shearim, she collects traces of her past that survived her return to religious observance. She finds cut-out photographs and pieces of fabric decorated by hand, brought from Iran. She scans, prints, cuts, and photographs these materials. She dons the emptied figure of her mother, holds it in an embrace, and in this way searches for traces and information about her family’s roots. Guy Banaim photographs Tomer in her natural environment, in the kibbutz landscape and along the Jordan River that crosses it. She looks directly at the camera, creating a moment of intimacy where the viewer is invited to look into her world and recognize the struggle between body and soul. The water tower, the architectural symbol associated with the kibbutz, peeks through a hole appearing in Tomer’s face. The photographs in the exhibition examine the incompleteness of the body as a shell defining the "self," and touch upon the complexity of a fragmented and detached identity within a social environment structured by dichotomous distinctions. The thin, invisible thread connecting the two figures stretches between different and complex worlds, mapping the imagined boundaries of internal and external struggles.