The exhibition is a journey of transformation, an installation formed from three smaller installations moving from sculptural codes into a personal language, between collective culture and the personal experience.

 

My “manual labor” receives special emphasis in this exhibition. It is the disorder arising from the inner life of fetishistic, inanimate objects which appear throughout our daily life which animates the three stages. By using anonymous plastic and everyday objects, I invest them with extra added value through displacement of their function and intense handwork applied to them using organic materials, thus restoring their specificity and value. The work with the strings becomes a pure act of drawing in dislocated space, in a demanding emotional performance – my hidden performance.

 

I use the word “animism” to refer to the anthropological layer denoting faith and belief in the psychological power of the inanimate object, which becomes a personal subjective and specific sculpture.

 

In contrast to metaphysics, which engages in sublime areas far above ordinary life, beyond the body and the mundane, animistic sculpture attempts to breathe life into objects through transformative mental processes, to provide everyday functional objects with a sculptural and surrealistic status over and above the object itself, far beyond its original symbolic space. The animistic sculptural act arises from a vague yet concrete source originating in an emotional and autobiographical experience, the opposite of an abstract image. It portrays objects out of anxiety and delay.

 

The act of sculpture is accompanied by tikkun, by repairing and joining together, with faith in the power of the inanimate object to act within a world of meaning. My sculpture takes place out of the struggle against scorn, prohibitions, and avoidance. The sculptural act arises out of layers of transformative process. The final sculptural form or the fragmented form is born from a long process of trial, error, and repair, which transforms experience and time into an object; it is not cast from an ideal concept. It comes out despite an internal struggle, and is based on that struggle against and with the materials, which paradoxically makes sculpture spiritual research.

 

Room I – “The Library”

“Additional objects” form a library of small-scale sculptures creating a fragmented narrative, a lexicon without a source. Each object is a memory trace into my past work.

The objects are arranged as a collection of moments.

 

Room II – “The Chrysalis”

Some of the large pieces are hung over the void between heaven and earth, while others strive towards the metaphysical. Some crouch on the floor and expand, or grow out of the ground. Some of the objects have handholds, wheels, or handles.

This is a complex collection of surrealistic, parodic objects, on the axis between nostalgia and elegy.

 

Room III – “Personal Order”

Conceived as “the private room,” or “the room of the unknown,” this is the place where the direction of the entire exhibition is heading. This is a total room, extremely personal.

 

Etti Abergel