“….Gil Marco Shani’s installation is total, experiential, and surrenders itself to fantasy: House, bedroom, inside a tropical forest. The booklet Safari is inside this house and includes photographs of villas at night, observing them from the outside. The installation looks like the interior one of these Villas.
The house is reminiscent of a place of living – a hotel or a boarding school dormitory. The three beds that are in it disturb the norm of the double bed which is perceived as the correct and proper. In one of the magazines that are placed in the “house”, images of exotic bird chicks appear – featherless parrots, in their early development stages: the blooming of the feathers as a sexual metaphor. The parrot is the exotic, it is freedom and temptation. In its charming colors, it represents painting, art. It’s “as if” speech/language, in other word it’s “as if” humanity, makes it a representative of the “other”, and also ties it to the concept of the Uncanny. To add to its feeling of entrapment, decadence and voyeurism, this work evokes a feeling of horror.”
Text by Elen Ginton, from the catalogue of “Helena”.
Helena Rubinstein Gallery, Tel-AvivMuseum, 2002
