Africa Israel — Naama Arad

Africa Israel
2013, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

Thread by thread she is brushing at her gate. Awaits. My body is punctured like yours, and my front is as my back. You've no need of tongue when you are with me. Your gaze penetrates and reflects, I am through you and you are through me. Whisper in my ear and you will be revealed. Who am I?
This is not a riddle sentencing life or death, and it has not one solution. This riddle implies ambivalence and it derives from reduction and urgency generated by material, technological and emotional oppression. The system creating the organs is not a rational unit, one that builds a foundation, then walls, then a door or a window. These are multiple systems working simultaneously and autonomously, under the same irrational bureaucracy, under the same economy. The forcing of language into the object's body is a process of attraction and repulsion, separation and mergence towards a liminal moment that lies between image and space. A gate as an object of minimal volume but of potential for infinite space, facing inwards and outwards concurrently.
The image becomes matter in a different, unfamiliar state. Object as an image that invites an encounter, first as an obstacle, then as a screen and a pattern, eventually serves as a portal. It is an image of action, of interactions. In the fraction of time when the object is opening up, the action reveals itself as viscera, as a repetitive craft pattern, a mechanical hand, metabolism, pleasure and destruction. The creation of the image is linked with the desire to destroy it, yet the labor is ceased, moments before complete destruction. It is an instinct of survival. Dependency on the object as a carrier of existence, as a thin irremovable skin. Action is a form. A system of encounters between beings. It is a network that doesn't need the digital because it operates in a plain where the material itself is a carrier of information. Object as a folder. Assortment of actions resisting hierarchy. Mobility is enabled by parasitism, building is enabled by destruction. An object initially formed as a divider between consciousness and the world, now becomes a conductor. This object is a symptom of the same action that wishes to destroy it from within. It is an action that realizes the object in the gap where binary categories, memory and oblivion collapse. It allows it to take place in a dynamic and tense manner. In a form as a struggle.

Oren Pinhassi