Bat-Ami Rivlin at L21 Gallery

Artist: Bat-Ami Rivlin

Exhibition title: Boat, Plastic, Tire

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: November 17, 2023 – January 5, 2024

Photography: Juan David Cortés / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

L21 PALMA opens Boat, Plastic, Tire on Friday, November 17th, a solo show by New York-based artist Bat-Ami Rivlin. On this occasion, the gallery presents two monumental installation pieces accompanied by three processual drawings, the result of Rivlin’s residency during the month of June at the gallery, located in Palma de Mallorca.

Both installations, Untitled (boat, 3kg rag, tire) and Untitled (plastic, duct tape), are part of the research conducted prior to the residency in Mallorca and during the latter, revolving around the yacht industry on the island. The two installations are fabricated exclusively from locally sourced materials. Untitled (boat, 3kg rag, tire) is built from the (still) recognizable deck of a small abandoned boat on the shores of the island, 3 kg of wholesale-store rag, and a discarded tire from a local car scrapyard. Untitled (plastic, duct tape) is a seemingly unaltered construction of different pieces of surplus contaminated shrink-wrapping plastics.

The topic of Boat, Plastic, Tire seems to be, in an almost ‘in-your-face’ way, the same plain objects that the title lists. There is, nevertheless, a specific relation to the object which Rivlin calls for, provoking a turn in intentionality towards the object that appears in front of us. In this case, almost a direct consequence of the local sourcing of the objects and their specificity to the island, which reveals their functional nature in the context of the Palma gallery. By limiting the possibility of the installations to be transported and placed outside their context, the object fails to become a fetish – the essence of the artwork becomes its protocol and no longer its symbol or content. Its only way out of its particular geographical context relies on a series of steps towards its possible reproduction – i.e., finding a boat, sourcing its deck, contacting a shrink-wrapping yacht company, sourcing their polluted plastics… – following this universally-local protocol which accompanies the artwork should it be sold.

In this exhibition, Rivlin is inviting us to re-think the phenomenology of function these objects carry, problematizing our practical experience with them. Showing the raw object is almost strange – it separates the aforementioned from the afterthought discourse that usually surrounds them. The boat, plastic, rag, and tires, barely modified, invite us to subtract this apparent complexity that is created around their function, unveiling the universal economic system and consumerism dynamics that lie behind these objects. In the specific context of Mallorca, these are indeed fundamental pieces for the development and growth of the yacht industry, part of the leisure and luxury tourism sector, responsible for the high metal and plastic pollution of the island’s waters (careened waters). It is as though by imposing the plain materials, the fleshed out channels of the system in which we operate every day in the context of the island, that the discourses that permeate the objects with which we function unravel. Understanding that the object stands for its function means accepting that it is intrinsically embedded in a productivity system that showers them through complex layers, covering, most of the time, the economic and exploitation dynamics in which they take part.

Overall, Rivlin’s work in Boat, Plastic, Tire presents a specific phenomenology of Mallorca’s recreational boat industry, where her installations are meant not to be traditionally sold and re-located but rather reproduced under the same protocol that they were once created with. It is from this specific relation to the object’s almost universal yet local function from which, for the artist, it makes sense to begin the discussion about our relation to a system’s material outbursts.

-Paula Ramos Mollá

Bat-Ami Rivlin, Boat, Plastic, Tire, 2023, exhibition view, L21 Gallery, Mallorca