Dress consists of two photographs. The first features a woman running, looking back with frightened face, the train of her dress sewn above the photograph, dragging behind her along the corridor. The dress’s length is unproportional to the woman’s dimensions. Hanging on the opposite wall is a photograph depicting women in undergarments watching the running woman. The one woman is the object of the gaze of this group of women, and their gaze seems to be her object of fear. The knowledge that she is being watched, that she is being followed, dictates her bodily posture and the sense of horror engulfing her. Yet she is also the one who succeeded in getting out of the line, out of the norm, and she is not as exposed as they are. Her elegant dress with its excessive tail is akin to an artificial extension to her body, as if bearing traces of time and cultural conventions that burden her movement.
Seven Minutes of Heaven presents two women: one is plump, wearing a white leotard, standing frozen and passive against a black backdrop; the other – blond and well shaped, wearing revealing clothes. The latter holds a brush dipped in black paint, and starts painting the former”s garment, “subtracting” the fleshiness from her silhouette and creating the illusion of a thin body. When she finishes painting, the blond woman, the “model for imitation”, leaves the frame. The woman in white remains alone, lets her hair loose, and starts dancing. Her sensuality is articulated only after she breaks free from her original body image and adopts the social dictate of thin female beauty. Her sense of vitality stems directly from an ostensible yielding to this specific code of external appearance. That appearance, however, is a grotesque visual illusion whose generation is witnessed by the viewers, and the figure, in a desire to imagine herself meeting an impossible beauty ideal, complies by and yields to it despite its ludicrous artificiality.
The exhibition was produced in collaboration with the Art Gallery, Memorial Center, Kiryat Tivon
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