Nitza Perry

The Hunger Rush

"When the need is dreamt by society, the dream becomes a need." Guy Debord

This exhibition is the first one in a series of three exhibitions exploring the theme of Hunger. Not a real hunger for food, or an existential hunger – but the kind of hunger which becomes passion and obsession for an object.

Objects, as Jules David Prown had put it so well ("artifacts materialize belief"), are used as a "medium", materializing values, expectations and believes, yet they tend to depict an ideal world. Ancient societies gave meaning to objects through their culture and customs. Today, our approach to objects has surfaced. Our world is an objects' world, and the gargantuan consumption of objects rules our daily life so much, that our whole life, as Guy Debord states it in his book Society of the Spectacle (La Société du Spectacle) seem to us like an enormous accumulation of spectacles.

The exhibition manifests the relationship between people and objects, which is so apparent in our existence. This relationship moves from controlled affinity to obsessive passion for objects. The passion – for food, for acknowledgement, for sex, for possession, for objects – is always present in our minds, greedy passion which generates insatiable hunger, the constant search for pleasure. The satisfied passion is reborn over and over again in a sort of Samsara Wheel. Our subjection to objects establishes and forms the daily aspects of our lives: our concept of time, our spatial relations, our social relations and our interpersonal relations, in the media, culture and arts. The problem arises when the same objected subjectivity does not distinct between need and dream, and turns the dream into a need. This phenomenon is also manifested in the way a work of art – which has always been also a piece of merchandise, but has always been more than a mere piece of merchandise – becomes a desired and consumed object. The art world invades the private life and swamps the art consumer with expensive visual capital. Is it oppression or temptation? Incapacitation or perfection?  The subject remains helpless, with a passion experienced as discontent and a feeling of absence.

Tova Lotan indulges  in the object she photographs. Her model is a water container, looking like a crystal ball; half of it is filled with water. Lantana flowers float on the waterline. The container is located in mid-frame, as if it was the center of the world. The background is blurry, but the blossoming garden is reflected in it. The entire garden seems to be floating, as if it was uprooted from its original environment and then reinvented itself as a kaleidoscopic world, detached from the ground, gravity-free and rootless. The ball does not provide one stable and fixed picture, but a state of constant change. In the second photograph the ball lays on the ground, as a "mini-world" model, a small scale reality. The object sets its own place in space and the code for its powerful meaning. As a wide open mouth it sucks in and gulps the viewers' gaze.  

Curator: Nitza Perry

indulges