FREEZING MY SENSES
Freezing My Senses is an installation that turns the refrigerator, as a container of preservation, into a paradoxical museum of fragility, illusion and repressed reality. The work presents an experience of a confrontation between text, object and space where the usual role of the refrigerator is perverted. Rather than food, the objects stored here are pieces of thought, irony, and vulnerability: handwritten notes, discarded objects. Everything is there not to feed the body, but to disturb the mind. In our modern world, the truths are being mediated, manipulated and re-framed until they may be lost completely. Repeated and spread lies assume the form of permanence. Our feelings and wants and our sense of criticism, in a freezer, are frozen-preserved. The fridge is used as a symbol of how societies maintain illusions, how ideologies seek to freeze the perception and how people are expected to live in distorted realities.
The texts projected on the refrigerator surface generate a changing conversation between the inner world and the outer world. The visitors are not only welcomed to see but to be involved: to open the refrigerator, to read, to ask questions, and to leave their own words. This participatory act is opposed to the passivity of consumption. It demands that the process of writing, of placing oneself into the frozen archive, of inserting one’s own text, becomes a means of warming silence, of opposing the machinery of lies, of creating collective counter-memories.
The installation disintegrates the difference between the banal and the existential by contrasting the banal with the charged texts. Shoes, cones, wires, containers, all mundane in themselves, are now displacement, warning, and containment when re-contextualized in the cold of the refrigerator. The question of the work is: What happens when even truth becomes perishable? Which of our possessions do we decide to save, and at what price?
The texts projected on the refrigerator surface generate a changing conversation between the inner world and the outer world. The visitors are not only welcomed to see but to be involved: to open the refrigerator, to read, to ask questions, and to leave their own words. This participatory act is opposed to the passivity of consumption. It demands that the process of writing, of placing oneself into the frozen archive, of inserting one’s own text, becomes a means of warming silence, of opposing the machinery of lies, of creating collective counter-memories.
The installation disintegrates the difference between the banal and the existential by contrasting the banal with the charged texts. Shoes, cones, wires, containers, all mundane in themselves, are now displacement, warning, and containment when re-contextualized in the cold of the refrigerator. The question of the work is: What happens when even truth becomes perishable? Which of our possessions do we decide to save, and at what price?
2016
Freezing My Senses is not so much about answers as it is about tension: tension between coldness and warmth, silence and speech, preservation and decay. It performs a living metaphor in which all participants make the archive unstable so that the refrigerator never remains in one place but is continually in a state of flux, an unstable witness to the unstable and disputed space between truth and lie. The work is an ongoing process.
