Interior -
Tal Alperstein

Curator: Eran Eizenhamer

The dreams and the things that make up our most private space, our apartment, are the focus of the exhibition Interior. Over the past three years the artist Tal Alperstein has been conducting an ongoing exploration into the way in which our living environs are designed. In her apartment she set up a laboratory of sorts staging different types of apartments. She used her camera to document the sense of time and distinct character created by each space, the way in which individual rooms behave, and the subtle choreography of the actions that take place in tandem in separate spaces. The result is a trilogy of short films, featured in the exhibition, which offer a poetic reading of the fantasies, emotions and constraints that compose our living environments.

In Home Movie, the first of the three films, faraway Hollywood images pour into our most protected and personal space. The film touches on the chasm between these images and the actual life being lived within the walls, turning the gaze to the qualities and materiality of the sort of dead time that TV series and films shot in houses tend to ignore, as we do, too.

Corridor, the second film in the trilogy, pays homage to films shot at the Bauhaus School. The Bauhaus films depicted the modern apartment as an embodiment of the good life, a life supported by functional and precise design. Shot at Liebling Haus, the film has a Bauhaus apartment – of the type whose various versions still serve us today – acting as the lead character in the plot and as a factor that determines the relations between the people residing in it.

I.Furniture, the final film, has humans in the role of items of furniture. The film’s actors perform as various pieces of furniture, enacting their everyday functions in the home. These human furniture pieces take us by surprise when they recall the original role of furniture – an extension of the body. The film offers a new, physical gaze on the design of the furniture items that surround us, revealing the poetic potential they contain.

The exhibition regards the interior design of the apartments we inhabit in a manner far removed from the consumer viewpoint, which perceives design as lifestyle and the apartment – real estate. Interior design here appears as the intersection of culture, aesthetics and architecture, allowing us to rediscover the emotional and poetic wealth of the spaces we inhabit, and the human relations formed within them.

Tal Alperstein (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary, video and performance artist. Her work centers on the meeting of the cinematic and the performative and explores the ways they complement or disrupt one another. Tal has a BA from the Academy of Art and Design, Bezalel and an MA in Film and Television from the Tel Aviv University. Her works have been presented in exhibitions and festivals in Israel, Europe and East Asia. Her short film Home Movie won the grand prize at the 2021 Videodrunk Festival for Alternative Cinema in Ontario, Canada.

Curator and design: Eran Eizenhamer; Hebrew text editor: Yoni Raz Portugali; English translation: Sivan Raveh; graphic design: Noam Noi; exhibition production: Anat Levy