Inedible Things

My series of photographs consists of sports accessories (football), fruit and one photo of a girl sitting on a bed.

The objects are body shields for players of football an especially masculine and violent game. These accessories, photographed on a light background and removed from their normal context, have their status changed in the work  and attain another meaning. The accessories that are supposed to protect vulnerable parts of the body like teeth, chin, and testicles are portrayed  disconnected from their regular context, as threatening things and … in  their power to arouse different associations and most importantly  -  violent feelings and tension in the one who views them from outside, with no professional or utilitarian involvement.

The fruit are to be related to in the same way. They also strengthen the feeling that was created by the accessories, because they appear wounded or damaged but at the same time are beautiful and tempting, although it is clear that it is impossible to eat them.  In addition, the fruit suggest different human body parts and their beauty combines with disgust and the rot of the wound. Presenting them on a black background emphasizes them as objects and their being things different from those that we are sold in day-to-day life – all that creates a unique experience and unusual connotations.

Parallel to these two series including the display, there is also a photo of a girl sitting on a couch with a plastic cup in her mouth. The cup is stuck between her teeth for the purpose of drinking, despite the fact that the girl cannot do this, as her hands are tied behind her back for no clear reason, and any movement will cause the water to spill onto her.  The girl is thin, dressed in a white shirt so that thoughts of sickness and pain rise within us.

She is "stuck" and appears to be cruelly imprisoned, not in control of her body, even though here is no external injury.  And despite this, she seems  to be in a turbulence of feelings and emotionally wounded, destroying her from within.  The  "threatened" (Freud's concept) do not stem from the external environment to the photographed image, but within herself; this is not an external, physical injury,  since if the mental illness which is destroying from within and which stems from her body it is a sickness which has no explanation and lacks all logic and is therefore frightening and threatening.

The "threatened", a foreign body, - the "other" and the unpredictable on the one hand, but very familiar and close on the other hand, exists within us and therefore is more threatening and unreasonable. The sports accessories, as well as the perishable fruit and the photo of the girl are "actors" in a staged series, all of which sketch the outlines of the "other", the different, the unfamiliar, although they all exist within us at the threshold of our homes. 

  Renata Gal.pdf (585 KB)