Stairway, 2011, Mixed media

Gil Marco Shani's current installation joins a series of total environments that he has built in the last decade. The installation is based directly on the architecture of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Nevertheless, in Shani's action there is more than an attempt to expose or reflect the structural aspect of the architecture. This is not a site-dependent installation, but a stage set, a fictitious space, a total and dead materials environment. Shani has hidden away the museum's staircase, which ordinarily connects the building's lobby to its large display space, and has turned the passageway into a passageway of another order: over the existing stairs he has built an inclined ramp; at some distance from the existing walls he has built new walls, which together with the low ceiling constrict the space surrounding the viewer and press down upon him/her. He has dimmed the lighting and lowered the temperature. The space has turned into a sort of tunnel or sleeve, drawing the viewers into it and leading them through the liminal space to a transparent, locked glass door which blocks their continued movement. Through the door appears the entranceway to a residential building – a staircase to the first floor, another to the basement, a mirror, an elevator – in a lighting setup that simulates morning twilight.

The viewers find themselves outside the building, conscious of the fact that though they were drawn inside, ultimately they have been excluded. In other words, the spatial disorientation exerted by the installation blurs the cognitive difference between being outside and being inside, so viewers are unable to determine where they are in fact located. The spaces of consciousness offered by Shani in this work enable us to rediscover the interfaces and partitions between the physical and the mental, between the actual and the conceptual. Ostensibly, it's easy to recognize Shani's reference: the exemplification of a local Israeli style in architecture, of apartment buildings in middle- or lower middle-class neighborhoods. The appearance of the entranceway to the building is, however, mythological – a dream event, absent any distinct time and place.