The evocative archeological assemblages of Etti Abergel’s installation profoundly alter one’s sense of orientation literally through the reconstruction of the viewer’s physical space, and figuratively by re-investing the significance of familiar objects with suggestive layers of memory and meaning. By contrast with Mona Hatoum, Abergel’s engagement with similar subject matter opens onto a transformative, hopeful experience, although only after attending carefully to the darker side of subjectivity. Entering the space of an Abergel installation is to be submerged in memory, in labyrinths and projections of thought, emotions, associations, fears and passions.
Her monastic, white, plaster-wrapped or tape-covered domestic objects, some fragmented, some hanging in space, radically transform our sense of place, submerging reality in an atmosphere composed of something other than breathable air. Here are the pillows she sewed with her grandmother as a child, there a basket from the market, a chair, an old shoe: a woman’s robe is covered in white concrete, a comforting yet suffocating cocoon. Wrapped, taped and fragmented, this world can only be apprehended by catching the shadows, taking it unawares.
Each installation functions for Abergel as a “poetic documentation, a kind of visual diary of my conflict as a second generation North African immigrant to Israel. Part of my work and my struggle deals with the crisis of transition from tradition (Islamic and Jewish) to modernism.”1 In each installation, Abergel struggles to create a private bridge between the broken heritage of an environment which insists that “art is no place for girls like you,”2 and the current narratives of contemporary life. Each installation tells a fragment of an unfinished story, chapters from an ongoing diary or “semi-autobigraphy” that has unfolded through the past eight years of her work. Her struggle is located in the opposition between the presence and absence of the human form, between the concrete materiality of the work and the antimaterial, negative space between the objects themselves.
Abergel’s installations dance and weave between the figurative and the abstract, thwarting the narrative of domestic objects in the abstract form of their wrapping. But this concealment is not just an example of the uncanny, nor is it only about literal or figurative repression, a rebirth of form. The energy and force of the baroque shapes and fantastically convoluted architectural elements, hanging from the ceiling and growing from the floor, function as a doodling or drawing in space, as much a celebration of the artistic process as they are about objects and their relationship to the surrounding space.
In her current installation, Don’ t Look Back (A Three-Dimensional Walk), Abergel acknowledges that here she is making an effort to ignore the autobiographical memory that has shaped her previous work, in favor of “a parody of a person who remembers more than the environment wants him to remember… a person who can’t live in his time or have a present, but inhabits the past and dreams.”
The installation is like a fabulous labyrinth greeting the viewer with waves of pencils, an arch of shoes, slowing the senses of time as one pauses to take in each fragment, hence the three dimensional walk through this maze of memory. Moving from autobiographical to “fictional” memory, Abergel’s work propels her (and the viewer) onward, through a transformative process that entreats us to leave behind the fragmented past of memory and desire, as we move from an internal, dark space to one that is airy and light. While references to the artistic process have occurred in her work before, notably the repeated use of the pencil (“very basic and essential, the ultimate material with which you can make art, the simplest and yet most urgent artistic tool”), 3 there seems to be a newfound confidence in this work, an assertion that art might indeed be a place for “a girl like her.” Before it sets, the white plaster that encases the objects flows like milk, invoking an alchemical transformation of materials: the
feminine liquid that fills a vessel hardens into a chalky, exterior surface. The chains of association in the installation are constant: nets of shopping baskets are objects washed up from the sea of memory, pencils cached in a bottle symbolize pollution of the water within, and all are caught up in the symbology of Abergel’s fictive universe.
1. Conversation with the artist, 24 September, 2004.
2. This statement was sewn into the artist’s installation at the Venice Biennale, 2003.
3. Conversation with the artist, 24 September, 2004.
Manon Slome is a curator, living in New York City. This essay is from the catalog of the exhibition, Such stuff as dreams are made on: An exhibitionof contemporary Israeli art, held at the Chelsea Art Museum, March-April, 2005, Curated by Manon Slome. Reprinted with the kind permission of artis.
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel