Fruits of the Night, 2019,
Photography, video, carpet, objects, variable sizes.
Solo exhibition, Indie Photography Group Gallery, Tel Aviv
Curators: Ilanit Konopny, Irit Carmon Popper.
Photos: Maya Attoun, Mia Gourvitch
Text by Ilanit Konopny.
“Objects, like people, bear the marks of time in different ways from one another[...] what makes us love a particular object. Is it a process akin to the evaluation of a work of art, sculpture, or photography? Is this an object that embodies traits perceived in the aesthetic realm, its shape and appearance? Or is it an object that reflects our financial, cultural, or social status?”[1]
Crumbling and dilapidated, the castle still stands tall, breathing in the scent of the fungus that pervades it, forlornly exhaling the decay of its dead. Cavernous and bare in the darkness, it merges with nature, its features are covered by solemnity and melancholy fitting of its age, but also enchanting in its beauty, overpowering in its simplicity. Across its graying walls spread untamed branches and mold that feeds on the night mist and the vapor rising from the river at its feet.[2]
The memory of a princess who appeared in the castle for a brief moment, a woman of nobility attached to the house, the objects, the family, the place, is also etched in it. Immediately identified with hostility and danger, she experienced firsthand the infinitesimal difference between human and nonhuman. What did it feel like to become the foreigner, the threat, the vampire princess – living in invisibility, in complete otherness, as though walking towards death?[3] How did she feel when she saw herself through the anxious eyes of those around her, subject to threat and fear of temptation?
In 1701 Eleonore Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena married into the Schwarzenberg family. Wandering through the Baroque-style castle, she yearned to bear an heir as was expected of her. Finally, at the age of 41 she gave birth to a son – which due to her advanced age was seen as a miracle or witchcraft. Shortly thereafter, her husband died, and her son was taken away from her to the Emperor’s Court in Vienna. In an attempt to alleviate her grief and improve her deteriorating health, Eleonore turned to concoctions and superstitious rituals. She was accused of vampirism, and upon her death in 1741, her body was taken in the dead of night outside the borders of Vienna to be buried away from the family cemetery. She was laid to rest in a subterranean cave, to which all causeways were sealed with rocks, to stop her from coming back to life.
In Fruits of the Night, the artist Mia Gourvitch presents objects and photographs that undergone processing, disassembly, and reassembly as assemblages based on the amalgamation of historical narratives and cosmological phenomena. She traces the story of Schrattenberg Castle in Austria, where she stayed as an artist in residence, and the figure of Eleonora, the Princess of Schwarzenberg. Gourvitch wandered through the empty castle in the day and at night, photographing the ruins that emerge from the forest that has taken over the castle, and the forces of nature and the landscape that engulf it.
Upon her return to Israel, she continued to photograph and work in the urban space of Tel Aviv, collecting scraps of discarded furniture, renovating and reconstructing them. They became her objects, but at the same time, they also cling, connect, and fuse with images from times gone by. The castle takes on a new life, becoming an undead environment. She simulates hypnogogic hallucinations, consciousness between wakefulness and slumber, moments of visions, or lucid dreaming. Her artistic practice is influenced by the characteristics of Gothic art; fiction and fantasy veil the concrete elements in the works, formulating melancholy poetics through the strange, convoluted, sensual, spiritual, and marginal.
Schrattenberg Castle / Tel Aviv City are both purportedly domains controlled or governed by order, and as such stand in contrast with the forest or nature. “Here, so it would seem, you cannot run into a wolf, a bear, or a witch [...] the body/nature, excluded from the realm of culture, includes the unexpected, the uninhibited, the wild, the limitless, the senseless, the incomprehensible, the disturbed, the ridiculous, traits that require supervision or exclusion.”[4] Gourvitch comes in daily contact with all these. Her urban experience is accompanied by the observation of the supernatural, mysterious, unknown, incomprehensible.
Gourvitch’s nocturnal photographs reveal the constellations, the movement of celestial bodies associated with the cyclicality of light and darkness, and explore metaphysical elements. With the recurring construction of compositions out of existing raw materials, the photographs and objects offer portals and passages into an imaginary or other state of being.
The exhibition was held with the kind support of: Outset Studiomakers, The Israel Lottery Council for Culture and the Arts, the Department of Arts, Culture Division, Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Tel Aviv.
[1] Jonathan Ventura, Objects − Industrial Design in Israel, Tel Aviv: Resling Books, 2014, p. 32 (in Hebrew).
[2] Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/932/932-h/932-h.htm
[3] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Jerusalem: Magnes, 2010, pp. 15-31 (in Hebrew).
[4] Jonathan Dayan, “Sneaking into the Castle,” in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Tel Aviv: Resling Books, 2017, p. 138 (in Hebrew).