The Opening Gallery presents the New York premiere of
Orit Ben Shitrit
:
ECHOES IN MY MOUTH
+
WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
(EMPAC commission)
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20, 6-8pm
Exhibition: July 19 - July 29, 2023 (Tue- Sat)
The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, Tribeca, NY
Curated by Maureen Sullivan
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Special Event: Wednesday, July 26, 6:30-7:30pm
“Becoming leaf: queering technologies toward human photosynthesis” talk by Vanina Saracino. Followed by a conversation with Orit Ben Shitrit.
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Short version:
Orit Ben Shitrit: ECHOES IN MY MOUTH +WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
ECHOES IN MY MOUTH and WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES are moving image speculations about the fragmented Mind. ECHOES depicts humans who struggle to find purpose and motivation in a future society where memories have been rewritten, and conflicts resolved. WARD lays out a cyborg's upheaval. Their broken and fractured mind is ultimately celebrated through imagination, color, music and dance.
Orit Ben Shitrit: ECHOES IN MY MOUTH +WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20, 6-8pm The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, Tribeca, NY
These works are moving image speculations involving the fragmented Mind. In ECHOES IN MY MOUTH, individuals struggle to find meaning and motivation in a futuristic society where machines have achieved consciousness. Within this world, human memories and traumas have been rewritten and erased, leading to the supposed healing of our current fractured humanity and its conflicts. Bodies in robot-like movement roam from the natural world to a cave, seeking a dose of archived memories. This work references both seed banks and memorial archives, as well as Plato’s Allegory, questioning reality and our ability to create other entities, and the realm of artificial intelligence, beyond our self-referential cognition.
WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES is set in a 19thc. horse stable. It depicts the upheaval of a cyborg who struggles with suppressing his primal urges to conform to societal expectations. Distraught and failing to communicate his pre-Oedipal being, his mind cracks and unleashes an emancipatory carnivalesque dance troupe— Jinns—who emerge from his room’s furnishings.
The recent MEMORY DAYDREAMS, black and white acrylic paintings, are a rumination and an extension of the images from ECHOES IN MY MOUTH. Depicting trans-species combines of humans, plants, animals and machines, they are futuristic in essence, imagined beyond the limits of our human-centric perspective.
