"Sky Longs to Meet Water Like Sand"
09.07.2021 – 19.09.2021 @ RL16 Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 16, 10178 Berlin
The exhibition Sky Longs to Meet Water Like Sand by the Berlin-based artist Ben Dabush (*1989 in Jerusalem) invites us in an atmospheric setting of objects, which in their ambivalence can be read as interior design as well as art, to reflect anew on our own desire for consumption and the longing for moments of freedom, travel, transformation or escape from convention. These are socially virulent topics, and not just since the Corona pandemic; think, for example, of the trade in second-hand and vintage products, which is gaining in popularity and value, or the deliberate relocation of young families or cultural producers to the countryside, which is of course partly forced by gentrification.
In Ben Dabush’s first solo show, we see curtains draped sculpturally in front of the wall, a screen that at first glance seems “Far Eastern,” and blinds attached to distinctive stand-ups – all initially movable furnishings that serve to divide space and create a sense of privacy.
However, the generic, easily accessible motifs that more or less clearly depict “splashing seawater,” “a desert landscape,” and “a blue sky (even with fair-weather clouds)” on their surfaces seem to open up space and thus become projection surfaces – against their actual functions of demarcation and visual protection. They catch us with their elemental imagery and suggest a form of transcendence, although they do block our view, at least on the purely material level.
“My idea is to explore the bright facade of escapism and to offer a moment of ease of mind. At the same time the show might also remind us that reality is inescapable,” writes Ben Dabush in an email interview that was created in the run-up to the show and can be downloaded here: PDF interview.
Ben Dabush’s exhibition is the first in a series accompanying a re-reading of the debut novel Things. A History of the Sixties, 1965 by French writer Georges Perec.