Marianne Berenhaut & Ariel Schlesinger at Dvir Gallery

Artists: Marianne Berenhaut, Ariel Schlesinger

Exhibition title: Hand Movements

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

Date: September 9 – November 6, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery is delighted to announce a duo show by Marianne Berenhaut and Ariel Schlesinger, ‘Hand Movements’. The exhibition will feature a historic piece by Marianne Berenhaut, ‘En Rang’ from the series ‘Vie Privée’ alongside a new series of works by Ariel Schlesinger, ‘Untitled’.

‘En rang’

The objects collected by Marianne Berenhaut are staged and linked in installations designated under the general title ‘Vie Privée’ (Private Life). They then become actors of imaginary situations and stories that each spectator can recompose. Between humor and tragedy, these works are all linked by recurring themes, linked to the personal story of Marianne Berenhaut who lost her parents and her older brother in the Nazi extermination camps as a child. Her installations evoke childhood, vain expectation and absence. A clear example is ‘En rang’ composed of smashed typewriters that shape a chaotic procession which suggests abandonment. The memory whispers and highlights a decomposed past that generates various interpretations.

‘Untitled’

The clock: A mechanical or electrical device for measuring and registering the passage of time at any given moment. A system that, regulating how and where humans spend their time, is a central tool in the commodification of time. The emergence of clocks was instrumental in organizing the realm of industrialized labor, where time is exchanged for money, punctuating the interchange of work and pause, of time off and leisure in Western and Western-colonized societies. But clocks were not the cause of origin in time’s commodification, since societies have always grappled with the passage of time in a multitude of ways. These other possible ways of grappling with time are at focus for Ariel Schlesinger in his current show. An artist who throughout his practice has been disrupting the commonplace functionality of objects in the intersection of industrial and manual production processes. In ‘Untitled’ 2021 Schlesinger takes the clock as a starting point from which to conceive of being-in-the-world – through a dance that involves two.

‘Untitled’ 2021 ties to Schlesinger’s interest in conceptions of time and temporality that we take for granted, doing so by unraveling the clock into a flow, a movement with no origin or end destination, where the essence of vitality continuously evolves through the phases that embody this motion, persisting through it as it shifts form and alters. In addition, he defies the accepted notion of time as an individual construct, manifesting it instead as a synchronization co-occuring between two simultaneously. To be two at once, therefore, gives rise to a sense of kinship where codependent movement in time amounts to the weaving of an experience, of being alive with others – of openings rather than closures.