Etti Abergel's installation Existential Cell gradually forms in the space, as she weaves life and memory into it. Time is a major substance in her sculptures. Continuous processes are recorded in matter, gradually accumulating into her work, attesting to a fragile existential movement. The journey draws her back and forth, a constant oscillation between wandering and domestication.
After four decades in Jerusalem, since studying at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Abergel returned to northern Israel. Over the years, her works have been exhibited extensively, and she gained international acclaim when she was invited to exhibit at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her unique, poetic sculptural language is embedded with contradictions. In past installations, she used household items and object fragments, detached from their familiar context. She blurred their identity with white plaster, and subsequently reassembled them in unexpected ways, emphasizing their fragile existence.
In the current installation, one discerns a pendulum movement in the space between two poles on either side of the partition: outside and inside, a nomadic cart and a temporary shelter. Moroccan slippers are placed on the doorstep of the intimate entrance space. Rounded objects, coated with concrete and adorned with gilded rings, conjure up human archeology, trickling amid the library shelves as if they were temporal strata. Metal trays carry distant mountainous vistas and a faint radiance.
Abergel's family immigrated to Israel from Morocco and settled in Tivon. Her grandmother, who was a carpet maker in Fez, taught her to appreciate the beauty of handicraft, which is pivotal to her works as well, but takes a sharp turn. Threads, tied together to form a grid, seek to deviate from the "correct" order; knitting becomes an expressive drawing in space. Abergel liberates the repetitive act from the shackles of tradition, bringing aesthetic contrasts of excess and austerity together, and blurs the boundary between abstract and concrete, high and low. The orientalist ornamentalism, overabundance, and conspicuous use of gold, rejected by Israeli art in its nascent days, are rewoven and remelted into the local aesthetic of raw concrete and the Want of Matter. The inversion creates a blend, which makes for Abergel's multiple narratives.
The experience of wandering resonates on the other side of the space: Abergel weaves a makeshift hut carried on a cart, until its branches are gently restrained by the canvas, on which they leave their drawn imprint. It is a paradoxical solo procession, with a trail of deconstructed domestic memories and furniture remnants trailing along behind it, flowing through the partition.
Abergel's existential cell transpires in an indefinite space, striving for infinite expansion. While yearning for the unreachable, she intermittently stitches and unstitches distant edges.
Shir Meller-Yamaguchi, curator