Tensioni e-statiche

Hilla Ben Ari returns to Rome to present her latest work Na’amah: A Tribute to Nachum Benari, a video work created for the Ein Harod Art Museum (Israel). Nachum Benari, writer and intellectual born in the Ukraine in 1893, was the artist’s great uncle and one of the founders of both the Ein Harod Museum and the nearby kibbutz. During his lifetime Nachum Benari published many academic essays and theatrical works, including Tubal-Cain (1951), a biblical-themed text which examines issues such as arrogance, guilt and punishment within a collective setting. This theatrical work proved inspirational for Hilla Ben Ari’s latest video work. She focuses on the marginal character Na’amah— silent sister of Tubal-Cain and daugther of Lamec who toiled as a gleaner—in an attempt to retell the biblical tale through problems related to gender issues. Na’amah represents a sacrificial victim of more powerful forces; the feminine figure constrained to silence and emarginated by the men of her own family who are able only in this way to impose their own presence. As usual in her work, Hilla Ben Ari communicates through body language to narrate about human relations and mental states; she puts these to the test through physical force, constraining them into uncomfortable positions for various minutes. Bodies are blocked in plastic forms, vibrating sculptures pulsating with tension and on the point of exploding. In the video, groups of persons are seen to be in opposition with individuals, expressing the dynamics of a group context; the actions are contained within the harsh, spartan scaffolding which delimits the forestage. Void of narrative, the video is essential and lyrical, with a sequence of images highlighting the physical states of strength, weakness and collapse.

The same tension of precarious equilibrium is embodied in Alice Cattaneo’s sculptures, exhibited for the first time at Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch. The Milan-born artist works on forms and materials, plastic, flexible or changeable; sometimes functional to her own mental imagery, other times the materials take precedence in creating artistic dialogue. As the artist explains, “It is an experience rather similar to what one feels in front of a landscape when you have the sensation of not really being able to see it; you feel blocked in front of the sight before your eyes. Her work is rooted in experiences of this kind, the impossibility of being able to see creates a sort of suspension in space and time which exists before the real perception of the world. Something akin to an area of transition”. (*) Thus, precarious structures are formed; they are assembled according to a pure plastic sensitivity, bringing together metallic grids, wooden sticks and sheets of plexiglass in a Constructivist gnarl. The understanding between materials is a form of poetics, created from the physical and private relationship between themselves and the surroundings where her installation are located. An almost sacred intimacy takes over the space which is charged with an unexpressed expectancy born from the transitory nature of the works, which seem on the point of transforming into something else.