Gabi Kricheli

The Promise Trilogy part 3: Floating World

Title: Floating World
Location: Gallery 39 for Contemporary Art
Area: 75 m 2
Year: 2011
Materials: clay, das, styrofoam, wood, sponge, wire, hot glue, plastic beads, paint
Curator: Tali Ben Nun

Floating World is The Promise Trilogy’s final chapter, which reveals the more personal and biographic
facets of Kricheli’s work in the trilogy. Unlike the two previous chapters, which were characterized by
site and time specific practice, in Floating World the womblike space of the gallery held objects and
sculptures that looked like a collection of autonomous objects, yet actually formed a hermetic
installation. Floating World’s sculptural language resonates the term “minor art,” coined by the curator
and scholar Gideon Ofrat, and creates charged and ambivalent associations between masculinity,
expertise, and heroism. 1
This time Kricheli avoided a thematic analysis of the space or mapping strategic focal points, opting
instead for a freer and more intuitive installation. This installation exposed its own weaknesses and
strengths to the viewers, forming intimacy between them and the objects that were scattered across
the floor of the space. Inside the high-ceilinged basement level white space, a theatrical macabre vision
unfolded – a repressed drama that gave shape, beauty, and ugliness to the line that separates life and
death.
The bulk of the exhibition took place on the floor, while a couple of works were mounted on the wall.
The notion of “low art” was expressed in this exhibition not only in the use of simple raw materials, but
also in the visitors point of view, which was directed downwards, towards the floor. Floating World
offered flotsam of an early civilization, one that possesses no identifying markers that can fix it to a
certain time in history: a hollow tree trunk whose stumps are scattered before it, bombs that grow wire
roots, severed heads screaming silently at the sky, the body of a girl lying on her stomach, her face
buried in the ground, a lump of used Styrofoam protruding from the floor, in which a death mask was
carved, an illuminating sign flashing the words “Smart Ass”, breached cities trying to protect themselves
from deterioration or a looming disaster. This is a “floating world” of images that shift between the
dreamlike and human, a delimited territory that is based on an independent space of associations and
reverberates memories and angsts, transience and vulnerability. The friction between grotesque
aesthetics and feminine labor-intensive craft, revealed a sensitive and brave portrait of a person, man,
and father in the 21 st century.