Bleach

A thorough cleaning of the house, to clean deep down to the foundations of the house: rugs are being rolled, furniture and objects are piled up one on top of the other, clearing wall and floor surfaces for scrubbing and washing. Bleach, that rinses it all, destroys and digests any remnant of previous activity, cleansing, polishing, filling the air with the smell of ammonia. Dganit Ben-Admon’s exhibition “Bleach” gleams of cleanliness, establishing an almost sterile space – like that of her grandmother’s house. While attentively leaning on the past, this domestic space squeezes itself into the corridor, where photographs are placed next to sculptural objects: flowerpots holding climbing or carnivorous plants, “pastelas” (Moroccan soft foot-rests) for sitting or a couch in the garden, a rug, a bat and some snakes – mostly whitened, as if they were rinsed by bleach.This setting creates a disturbed, melancholic domestic space, in which neither the obsessive cleaning, nor the shine of the polished floor, can disguise or dim the fears and frozen, haunted, silenced moments. As in her previous sculptural works, where she undermined the private and the domestic confronting the “standard” with the sick and weakened, here too Ben-Admon continues her dialogue with the past. Despite the polished façade she tries to return to what exists underneath – before the cleaning or after it, beneath the house’s foundations – to extract that same establishing Punctum, that very same perforation or trauma which can not be verbalized or rationally understood.