LITAL RUBINSTEIN
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Me and you
2019
On checks and balances inspired by H.N. Bialik’s poem “See Saw"
Art Intervention VI – Contemporary Art in Bialik House Museum, Tel Aviv.
Curator: Smadar Sheffi
Lital Rubinstein’s works are kinetic or potentially kinetic. She employs pink, the color of innocence, contemplating the constant tension intrinsic to relationships. In the floor piece Waltz, the pattern of severed arms grasping each other or clashing is in dialogue with the typical floors of Tel Aviv homes and the Bialik House. The image is ambivalent: the clasped arms can be read as either supportive or aggressive, close or alienated. The association to the floor pieces by Ai Wei Wei, one of the most outstanding contemporary international artists, is conscious. While Ai Wei Wei refers to absolute alienation and subordination, Rubinstein leaves room for doubt and perhaps a return to closeness.
Meme (a cultural behavioral phenomenon disseminated through mimesis) is a kinetic circle of dolls’ arms striving for contact and relationship. Between was built on the principle of the Foucault pendulum (named for the 19th-century French physicist Léon Foucault who demonstrated the earth’s rotation), but Rubinstein has diverted its movement to perpetuate a limbo state.
Text by Smadar Sheffi.