Ben Ron presents a new series of works entitled 'Shift'. Consisted of video installation, wood cut relief, sculpture and drawing, artist evokes a 'shift' of life and death through emotionally distanced yet exquisitely dimensional approach. The first sequence of the exhibition introduces a large-scale wooden relief series: 'Sisters', uniformed nurses in costumes that populate vast though ambivalent and timeless abstract interior spaces.
Aya Ben Ron (*1967 Haifa, Israel) studied at the Goldsmiths College in London. Throughout the years, she established a rich body of works that has been widely recognized and included in numerous international art exhibitions at MOCA Shanghai, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Hamburger Bahnhof among others.
In a diverse practice ranging from sculpture, video, drawing, and installation, Aya Ben Ron explores the morbid body, perception of death and morality, and the unconscious memory of pain in the greatest socio-historical extent.
Her first solo exhibition in Berlin presents Ben Ron's new series of works entitled "Shift". Consisted of video installation, wood cut relief, sculpture and drawing, Ben Ron evokes a 'shift' of life and death through emotionally distanced yet exquisitely dimensional approach. The first sequence of the exhibition introduces a large-scale wooden relief series: "Sisters" with cataract white and empty eyes - uniformed nurses in costumes that populate vast though ambivalent and timeless abstract interior spaces.
The second sequence, a video documentary depicting actual patients in a coma, shows an unmediated observation of life-in-between, of individuals deprived of human will, harshly confronting us with the void of our metaphysical existence.
"Still Life" is thus the paradigmatic title of the third sequence of the exhibition: a sculpture paradoxically designed as a merry-go-round populated by fetuses plugged to respiration machines. Recalling Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", "Still Life" indicates a vision of children playing with wooden horses where life is given and taken almost at the same time.
All new art works indicate the experience Ben Ron has accumulated over the years by studying thoroughly medical manuals and sketches, illness and medical treatments. However, the categorical articulations of Art and Science are overcome – neither by an aesthetization of the pathological nor by a biopolitical critique – but by revealing a world of essential normative modes of existence usually invisible in daily life.
Opening April 30, 7-9 pm in presence of the artist
AANDO FINE ART
Tucholskystrasse 35, 10117 Berlin
Opening Hours Tues - Sat 11 am to 6 pm
free admission