The exhibition “Life is a Cabaret” welcomes the visitor into a site specific installation that is especially designed to the unique space in which it is placed. This installation turns the Old Jaffa Gallery into a stage where marionettes are moving in a play of form, color, texture, movement and sound. The figures pull and push, draw near and reject, and create relations that move back and forth from the harmonious to unsettled disharmony, forming dynamic hierarchies and a constant change in the balance of forces.

The images in this installation were created in mixed techniques, designed skillfully from a variety of re-used materials like old clothes and rags, sawn on wire nets and filling materials or on pieces of old, broken furniture, which, in the recycling process, move from the practical into the artistic. The exposure of the inner structure of the marionettes invalidate the human illusion, creating the surreal atmosphere that emerges in the gap between reality and illusion.

In the central space of the gallery a group of human-sized marionettes is posed. The threads which these marionettes are hanged on create a grid that evokes  spider webs. The figures seem floating expressively in a slow quivering dance that is produced by an old fan. In the background, the repetitive sound of the word “Welcome” in English, German and French (which is a fragment of the song from the musical “Cabaret” by Fred Ebb and John Kander) invites the viewer in.  The lightness of the movement of the Marionettes strongly contradicts the fragmentation that characterizes the patchwork, dissecting the colorful cheerfulness and creating an aesthetics of shredding and disintegration; a paradoxical combination of the aesthetic with the repulsive . The figures are dealt with aggression versus compassion and delicacy, while the stitches seem like a futile, pathetic attempt of mending. What seems like a joyous dance turns into an expression of dismantling and helplessness. This is the fate of the human body: it is doomed to disintegrate.

In the other spaces of the gallery the figures that have danced themselves into exhaustion, have turned into a hip of scrap-bodies thrown away after performing their cabaret work.

Like previous creations of Meira Grossinger, “Life’s Cabaret”  installation carries feminist messages. The cabaret scene is a place of desires that aim to exploit the female body. Women are mere products for practical use or for show – disposable objects. These dancing marionettes evoke dancing women of all times including the ancient world of Greek Mythology and in the Bible: Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, Yiftah’s daughter in that tragic dance, as well as cabaret dancers of decadent Germany between the two world wars, in the eve of the darkest era in human history.

Daniella Talmor, Curator

April 2013