This exhibition is about the meaning of a home, and a home
within our own selves. A home where existential reflections
and anxieties are accumulated through the dramatic events
which characterize recent times.
Micha Ullman has created a home deep in the earth as a
shelter for the self, while Vito Acconci addresses the self-in-body
protected by the skeleton in World in Your Bones. Barbara
Bloom
defines her Mood Ring Home as a "tool for reflection" and
as a "house that talks back, a house which constantly
raises questions." Architect and artist Zvi Hecker combines
the need for poetry and precision in his Spiral, a contemporary
Tower of Babel—the archaic model of multiculturalism—where
all languages are integrated to create one whole.
The ascetic
room installation of Vittorio Messina, with its video projection
of dream-like images, is accompanied by
his words, "A home is done from the measures of his
space, and the events of his past." The works of Polish
artist Krzysztof Bednarski and the young Albanian artist
Anila Rubiku
refer to issues of identity and memory in our era of displacement,
in which people and their cultures are moving from south
to north and east to west. Their search for the essence of
the
self within political and cultural situations brings to mind
the influential thinker of the middle ages Hugues De Saint-Victor
who said, "Perfect is the one for whom the whole world
is like a land of exile."
—
Amnon Barzel
SEWN DREAMS
Time, dreams, home, and drawings...my world is composed of
24 embroideries. The process I've used is different compared
to my other art work and I've used the circle as a frame—a
representation of the perfect sign. While I sew with my hands,
time, dreams, home and my world, I ask
different questions regarding the home, my present existence
and the future. Where am I going? Will I ever have a home?
What do we need stairs for? I go on asking questions in most
of the embroideries. This sewing is my entire world: my time,
my poetry, my culture, my past and many other dreams for
the future. It is an artwork made up of 24
drawings/embroideries, statements, and poetry dreaming of
travel. In one of my embroideries I ask the question, "What do
we need time for and how can we measure it"? You need
time to draw, to dream, to come on this journey, to sew,
to chat; you need time for a Turkish coffee.
Being away from home and not in contact with my culture,
I discovered that I like sewing. I rediscovered this tradition
that has been passed on from one generation to another in
my
family. The imagery of the drawings is very strong while
the technique is soft and feminine. Both the strong drawing
and
the delicate sewing are mine. I know where I come from but
I don't know where I'm going. —Anila Rubiku
MOOD RING
HOME
Imagine an elevator with only one "random" button
that leaves someone at an unknown location. The door opens
and voila you're home: a room containing all the amenities
for living: a bed, a table and chairs, a kitchen, a couch,
a bathroom, etc. Essential to the project is imagining a
sense of comfort at the prospect of being at home and having
everything
one needs, coupled with never knowing exactly where one is.
Could the not knowing exist without the usual accompanying
panic or discomfort? It is said that a house is a machine in which to live.
A distinction should be made between a machine and a tool.
The machine is expected to fulfill a task for you. A tool
is to
be used. This house is a tool. It provides an exercise in
being comfortable with uncertainty, an exercise in
flexibility. It is an invitation to continually adapt your
immediate surroundings to your shifting needs. It is an architectural
mood ring.
This is not a place to escape reality. It is a place where
one's relationship to the world is heightened through becoming
increasingly aware of everyday choices. The house is not
some utopian structure, a model or an ideal, nor is it a
case house.
Maybe it's a learning center or a tool for reflection. Like
a meditation whose possibilities become apparent when they
are activated by use. A rehearsal hall. A practice room.
The CD is a game, a design tool, and a screen saver. —Barbara
Bloom
These notes were derived from an ongoing conversation
with Linda Taalman and Alan Koch of OpenOffice while working
on
the exhibition Houses X Artists.
WORLD IN YOUR BONES
The understructure of this microenvironment is screwed into
your bones, like a prosthetic skeleton. It lives on your
back, on your limbs, on your head; it moves as you move,
you barely
notice it as you go about your business. When you feel some
need, the plot thickens: the tubes slide, pivot,
telescope out—you become your own chair, your own bed,
and your own vehicle. A micro-shell fans out, over your head:
your head becomes your office. A macro-shell fans out, over
your body: your body becomes your house. Visitors enter your
house, as if coming in under your clothes. Your house leeches
onto a building: you own your own apartment; you move your
apartment from building to building. Your house leeches onto
a plane, a train, a ship, and a car: you ride for free. —Acconci
Studio
THE SPIRAL
The Spiral is a work of incomplete precision, which can't
be completely finished. The Spiral's incompleteness is also
its
poetry, because poetry is the most precise expression of
our need for precision. Expressive as it is, the Spiral can't
be
fully understood. It speaks too many languages at once and
at the same time. It speaks Arabic about human condition.
It argues in Hebrew for the sheer necessity to bring the
muscles
and materials together, but it is quite fluent in Russian
when construction becomes architecture. Its Italian is very
Baroque,
as spoken in Piedmont by Guarino Guarini. The Spiral is a
tower of Babel in miniature. —Zvi Hecker
I AM BRUNO SCHULZ
The suitcase in this exhibition belongs to my family—it
has traveled through history and countries: coming from Lvov,
a Polish city and today Ukraine. My family and the suitcase
together have changed cities: Cracovia, then Warsaw, and
today ending in Rome, where I live. The land of my family's
roots
was a region of many cultures and religions that
coexisted together. My grandmother's stories spoke of Catholic
churches next to synagogues and mosques. All of the culture
in the world was in one place.
Bruno Schulz, the great Polish and Jewish writer and artist,
killed during WWII by the Nazis, is a symbol of that
cross-culture which has now disappeared and is impossible
to rebuild. It would be nonexistent now if it were not for
memory
and art. The image of Schulz is based on his famous self-portrait,
which has always struck me—the large eyes full of fear—as
if they had always known their actual violent end, and the
end of the world of tolerance.
I have always dedicated my work to the people who have
been important in my life like Dylan Thomas, Joseph Brodskj,
Jerzy
Grotowski and many others who never had an actual house,
and always lived with a suitcase. Perhaps this is the way
of the
artist, it is their place, closed but mobile, always true
to them, place by place. —Krzysztof Bednarski
THE OTHER SONG
"
...The other song is that I am not destined to live a free
life; I know my time is measured, and I must not here dismiss
the infinite, but when I want or am tired of this life there
is someone that, so to speak, calls to me, an invitation I
will not know to resist…"
The inhabitant of a certain home has left, now uncovered,
but watches the front door of his or her house. For days
and days
they remain to observe. The idea is not to stay right in
front of the house, but ahead of it. It seems almost like
sleep —or
more simply, one is able to do this—deeply neglected
in the recess but more secure, and at the same time watching
over oneself. Now, this is a great privilege: to be before
the phantoms of the night with the unconscious abandon of sleep—but
without noticing, to look with clarity and vigorous caution
at the evening vigil. —Vittorio Messina
HOUSE
I have been digging since about 1970. My main form is the
pit, and my main working field is the earth, the ground,
the floor
or the street according to the situation. The work exists
always on the surface, and many times underneath. As an
environmental sculpture, the work is always a dialogue
with the site.
The indoor sculptures are mainly done from red sand from
the place were I live in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. The drawings
or
works on paper accompany my work. Without any help of brush,
just the flowing liquid according to slopes achieved by movements
of my hand and body, the language hints of quiet and in many
cases of negative forms reminiscent of the pit. In the drawing
House a missing white house can be seen possibly representing
a missing person which is typical of my work with "signs" for
human beings, never the real figure. —Micha Ullman
Amnon Barzel is a curator based in Rome, Italy and is Founding
Director of the Pecci Museum of Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy
and former Director of the Jewish Museum, Berlin. |
