Our Coming Was Expected On Earth
Anna Nova Gallery. St. Petersburg. 2018
In his project Haim Sokol yet again goes over Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and borrows his phrase without beginning or end for a project name. Sokol proposes to read it literally: “on Earth” means on “earth” i.e., on coast. As if these words are spoken by people who are in the sea. On the one hand, the title of the project turns out to be a tragic monologue of a choir dying in history, and Sokol’s installation turns into a poeticized seamy side of the new conditions of exclusion and oppression in a broad historical and socio -cultural field. On the other hand, Haim suggests the poeticization of everyday life, the artistic transformation of everyday objects, e.g., a bucket and a mop, as forms of resistance, as an example of creating new identities and new forms of life. And so, two hundred zinc buckets of dirty water in the installation are being transformed by the power of imagination into the sea.
Vered Lavie
