During the first COVID-19 lockdown, when I couldn’t get to work in the studio, I started using interior design magazines and catalogues of large retail chains, such as IKEA, as the basis and background for the series. I made paper collages in which the tidy houses in the magazine pages began falling apart into messy spaces, crammed with food and objects; the spaces became more human and less idyllic. I then scanned the collages, and they became the digital background for a short video clip produced in the app. I added moving figures and objects to them, to create dramatic and chaotic scenarios of small disasters in the domestic spaces, and the idyll began to dissolve. The people fall down, are cut, die, the cocktails dance, and the skulls float about. The calamities are moments of rupture, but the use of given images from the apps imbues the scene with a quality of grotesque and slapstick. The tiny dramatic scene is trapped within a repetitive scene that produces a climax with no beginning or end, no moral or catharsis.

As mentioned, the works in the series were created at the start of the pandemic, and are about home and isolation. They are based on readily available and accessible materials and tools—paper, scissors, glue, and a smartphone—and were born of a given situation of material restrictions. Seven works from the series were purchased for the Museum’s collection, as part of the COVID-19 Diaries project. The works became a digital sketchbook that has accompanied me ever since. The current display consists of four clips from the Museum’s collection, plus a new one in the series.

Image: Lali Fruheling, Home, 2020, image from digital video clip, 2 min, looped, purchase, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art collection, part of the COVID-19 Diaries project, courtesy of the late Prof. Michael Adler Foundation

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