Between Four Walls

Curated by Adi Gura. The gallery became a homey environment, with installations that create three spaces in a home — an eating room, a washing room and a sleeping room. These are three rooms where a person exists intimately with the body (eats, washes and sleeps), between the four walls of home.

In each work, in this homey atmosphere, appears an uncanny element (a concept claimed by Freud in 1919, indicating the paradoxical combination of the familiar with the foreign) which challenges familiar reality; it cannot survive there, and it produces an emotional reaction.

The exhibition in its complexity constitutes one single work. Psychological metaphors pass as a leitmotif from one work to the other.

The table installation in the eating room is a metaphor for suppressing impulses, sexual repression. A statue of a young woman sits defiantly on the dining table. She is sitting upright, demure and collected, and at the same time she gives pleasure to a plate. All her repressed sexuality erupts, but she is not aware of it being thrown onto the tea set behind her. The tea set pieces, stacked one on top of the other, create creatures not necessarily alive, taking part in an intimate, indecent activity among themselves.

The statues of the washing women in the washing room also deal with suppressed impulses. The two naked figures sit in a closed position, shy and hidden, but if the viewer goes around them, a vagina is sculpted on the upper part of their backs — impulses, desires and longings repressed backwards, to a place the sitting figure cannot see nor protect.

Another theme is the unfulfilled basic need, expressed by the lack of food in this homey environment, and by a digestive system through which nothing passes. There is no food on the table, nor in the squashed tea set in the framed pictures. In the washing room, a sink of mouths, esophagus and intestines has no faucet; no water flows. In the sleeping room, the woman lying on the bed has multiple breasts that do not carry milk: instead of nipples, the breasts have mouths.

A third theme is the creation of life through disassembling and assembling. Tea set pieces stacked together become living creatures in sexual interaction. Children’s toy blocks form creatures with feet, noses and babies’ mouths — the idea of a child, but only the idea, because a child cannot be realized in this homey environment. In Between Four Walls, the sexuality is one which is not fertilizing. Like the uncanny element in every room, a “child” too is a strange concept, un-homey in the homey reality of this exhibition.