'Unreasonable Doubt' by Yaara Zach at Petach Tikva Museum of Art

It is a largely black, almost monochromatic installation, in which materials and forms seem to flow from one piece to the other, echoing one another while tracing the memory of an intimate encounter between the body and various objects found in its surroundings, perhaps supporting it. In doing so, Zach’s work also traces the manner in which memories are constructed and consolidated, coming to appear closer or more distant and changing uncontrollably. The installation includes a series of unique objects that combine crutches, leather whips, and amorphous sacks filled with unidentified, variously colored fluids. Each of these assemblages constitutes a hybrid combination of worlds, sensations, and emotions, while the space as a whole seems to vacillate between extreme sterility and a permeable physicality. This almost impossible combination of elements drawn from different worlds, which represent extreme bodily states, is based on the use of readymade objects and industrial materials that undergo a process of disassembly and reassembly, in a manner that relates them to new contexts without eliminating or camouflaging the original ones. The works are minimalist in character, and resemble linear drawings in space, whose grouping together endows them with a certain impression of volume. A volume that is a result of what could appear as the bifurcation, replication, and multiplication of the objects in space, as they undergo a sort of spontaneous mutation. Yet this impression of volume, which creates a sense of presence, in fact attests to what is absent. The human body, which constitutes the quintessential point of reference for the various elements combined in the works, is completely absent from the space itself. The concern with the intimate contact made by the body as it leans, grasps, absorbs, or experiences pleasure evaporates, and all that seems to remain is a strange hairy growth sprouting out of one of the objects, and fluids in shades of black, blue and purple that are contained within soft sacks. And so, the very presence of Zach’s works points to an absence – a fundamental lack that cannot be filled mentally or emotionally. These minimalist, seemingly sterile works carry a disturbing charge pertaining to disruption, disorder, excess and contamination.