In the works which Nelly Agassi has prepared especially for the show at the Foksal Gallery, she used various means of artistic expression (performance, sound, video, prints, and objects). During the performance which is prepared for the opening of the exhibition, a construction will appear in the middle of the main hall of the gallery, consisting of a metal cart and a transparent container (resembling a hospital incubator). A motionless figure of the artist, enlightened with the light from two fluorescent lamps, will be lying in the container. An image displayed by a projector, presenting a delicate palm clenched into a fist and banging insistently on the wall appears will appear on the white front wall, as if unrealistically demanding to open the white wall. A somewhat neurotic sound - which calls to mind rapid heartbeats or the restless tick of a metronome - pulsates through the gallery, arousing a sense of restlessness and urgency in the minds and bodies of the audience. These are the poundings of the artwork in the process of its being born. Unlike real birth, however, the figure lying here is at once the mother and the baby, the artist and the artwork, the cause and the effect: a single-person think tank hard at work, wrote Adi Englman, the co-curator of the exhibition. The presentation of the Nelly Agassi's work is accompanied by a facial composite of the artist constructed by a local police officer according to a description given by an acquaintance of the artist. This imperfect and blurred image, resulting from the vision taken from the recesses of memory, reminds us that art is a matter not only of creation, but also of exploration; it is an incessant Sisyphean wandering into the depths of memory, imagination and feelings. This includes uncertainty, forgetting and rejecting, but also understanding, which allows the author to discover her own self and realise her works in due form, turned into objects, colour, time, and space. The essence of the exhibition is in showing the creative moment in which impulses and abilities of creation appear in their strongest dimension.
Curators of the exhibition: Adi Englman and Jaromir Jedliński
Realized thanks to the financial support of the National Cultural Centre.
Our thanks for their kind collaboration go to the Embassy of Israel in Warsaw, The Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts, Dvir Galery, Tel Aviv, as well as to the police headquarters in Poznan and police headquarters in Warsaw
