A wooden box enclosed by ropes might serve as a pertinent index to characterize Sarit Achtenberg’s exhibition, Where the Bucket Went, the Rope Followed. The space’s laconic use of material and object is joined by the voice of Oded Wolkstein, like a deceitful guide to the perplexed, a speaker whose identity is fluid, with mocking content, composed to jump from epistolary text to one-sided dialogue. Thus, the box image can, according to its authors, summon “an objectual realm, place, thing, THE thing…” while at the same time embodying “memory, promise, home.”* The proposal for the object’s decipherments continues to echo in the exhibition space, and its targets are called upon to shed their identities and: “If they feel like getting really done up tonight, to be a freak, an uninvited monstrosity, a nomad of unnamed paternity looking from afar upon, let’s say, the circle of soft light where the box’s inhabitants call each other by name.”

The generosity, at least on the face of things, of the audio explanatory text — which humbly converts the curatorial wall text, implicitly teasing the obsessive need to verbalize the visual – provides not just an explication of cryptic content and/or a grotesque platform for exhibiting the self, but also an inarticulate movement log which sketches out the choreography of wandering through the exhibition space. Thus, the speaker continues to flirt with the listeners in slick language and to bring forth, seemingly without even noticing, the protocol of habitual movement through exhibition spaces: “How great it is to see you stop. Always in the same place, exactly on this line, as if the rope itself is wound around your ankles even before you come closer. You think you are choosing not to cross, but I know it: you are unable. This boundary is not an object – it is your body itself.”

Doesn’t the attempt to release the space from its “conventional usage” retroactively conceal its transformation into another conventional usage? It stands to reason. Achtenberg’s exhibition does not purport to invent an alternative to a protocol of hearing the vision, movement, and attention, but rather seeks to prolong another glance at the hierarchies conditioned on the relations between artist-viewer-creativity.

Shlomit Breuer

*All quotations cited in the body of this press release are taken from the audio text written by Oded Wolkstein.