LITAL RUBINSTEIN
Newton's cradle
2021
Curator: Daniel Zdaka Cohen
Artspace TLV
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Lital Rubinstein’s solo exhibition portrays the postpartum period as a chaotic and disrupted state .Air, its absence, silence, and the longing for rescue envelop Rubinstein’s installation. She examines the function of support accessories familiar to every new mother—tools originally designed to assist and ease the challenges faced by mothers and their newborns. Yet, these objects come to symbolize power, failure, and the intense complexities of this situation. Newton’s Cradle, the exhibition’s title, refers to the physical desktop toy named after Isaac Newton, embodying a fixed order of continuous action and reaction. In this exhibition, that order is interrupted, and the expectation of predictable responses is disrupted. Rubinstein captures the sense of helplessness, creating a space devoid of functionality. She reflects the tension between motherhood and art, presenting the overwhelming anxiety and chaos within a sensual and polished aesthetic .A stationary physio ball coated in black velvet, a crib bumper printed with white noise patterns, an oversized baby carrier crafted from an inflatable rubber dinghy, earplugs transformed into an abacus, and porcelain breast pumps extracting from the gallery wall—these new works explore the tension between failure and success, noise and silence, and the attempt at control that ultimately falls short. Rubinstein freezes this fragile state, constructing a suspended reality that underscores the interplay between chaos and order, wrapped in a veneer of beauty and calm.