A Woman Fell Between Walking Men
“Two very heavy steel beams come out of the central wall of the galley space, in the middle of a round sewer lid, reminiscent of a female genitalia between two long legs. A kind of power game with Gustave Courbet's famous painting "L'Origine du monde". The vulva is not exposed but imagined, and the viewer's gaze reveals a metaphorical birth of a stiff lump that comes out of two steel legs, like a stenches sewer shaft. Hila Laiser-Beja’s Venus does not come out of the shell, fragile, beautiful and radiant of light, but is created from the stench of the mechanisms of Israeli society, of control over the body, and of the supervision and encouragement over birth giving. This headless Venus is dirty, ugly, lame, but speaks a pure, hard and depressing truth. If she could whisper to us secrets originating from the sewers where she was born, what would they be?”
Site-specific Installation, The Lab, April 2022, Tel Aviv, Israel
Curator: Sharon Toval
Hila Laiser Beja | A Women Fell Among Walking People (sharontoval.com)