Bite | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series

*Due to the current security situation, exhibition dates may change.

“Bite,” Einav Zeichner’s first solo exhibition, is a continuation of an interest that arose in her years ago, in the series of photographs “Anesthesia,” 2015. Zeichner explores pain and violence as inherent to desire, while deconstructing and reconstructing a heterogeneous identity, where the victim introjects the victimizer’s essence and is trapped in his webs as with the Stockholm Syndrome. From “Anesthesia” to “Bite,” interconnections and floating signifiers derived from different fields of knowledge are revealed: archetypes, voodoo, the uncanny, the abject, anatomy, food, New Age, and rituals of an ailing body, operating between black magic and white magic. The violent, sickening image of the male is internalized and adopted as a shadow among the other participants of the internal and collective carnival.

At the entrance to the exhibition is a window, treated as stained glass made of cloth, latex, and markers. A coiled image of a dismembered snake at its heart attests to the failure of the symbolic function of healing, rebirth, evil and deceit. On a narrow shelf along the perimeter of the space are objects akin to souvenirs, evidence from a crime scene, or holy vessels of a semi-pagan cult of lust and lechery.

In the passage between the two spaces of the installation, the viewer skirts a balding ball of hair which threatens to fall on our heads, and is sucked into an object-wall-altar smeared with gold pigment, soot, latex, and ashes of burnt plants, which together form an image extracted from a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Werewolf (1510). The altar turns out to be a duvet, which has undergone a transformation, alluding to insomnia and presumed solace. We are suspended indecisively between nausea and fascination. “Bite” conceals materials, objects, and energy remnants as evidence of a body that has acted clandestinely, the artist’s body.

As marginal agents interfering with the normalized and mocking an oppressive order, werewolf and male-girl are forever cursed, persecuted, and misunderstood. “The horns above Werewolf are antennae,” says Zeichner, “the blanket is a womb…” From the titles and context of the works, an ironic thread bursts forth here and there. It passes between the signifiers, but does not dispel or relieve the chill that accumulates in the viewers’ bones.

Masha Yozefpolsky