MFA final show, 2016, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Tel Aviv, Israel

Territory of Absence

Fluman creates her artwork in an installation space in which the works cohere together as a proposal for objects or a simulation of them. The latter elude their traditional status as having been made of concrete material, thus enabling and presenting the outcome of consciousness. At first sight, the images are perceived as a photograph of the image of bones supporting bodily organs, but the body itself is absent: only the support remains present as evidence of a body. For example, in the work addressing the neck, the image remains as testimony of the artist’s own neck, alluding to an absent portrait. The dirge for the body resonates in the exhibition space, while the images project passion and mourning, with a simultaneous embodiment of the spirit of being and nothingness.

A deeper look provides conveys to viewers a concrete sculptural presence on a two-dimensional surface, creating the illusory image of three-dimensional material. The image and its background are sculpted digitally using non-material tools. They are sculptures whose mold is a software program, formalized as the language of a different kind of object. The source of the image is photographic printing, however, the image is not a relic of standard documentation and staging, but instead was created using awareness as a tool and in a cognitive process. In this way, Fluman created a pelvic bone, conveying a material, plastic sensation through the language of digital resources.

Fluman states: “The materials I see have temporary qualities of life and death. They are linked to undefined Time. For example, in Mother, the materiality of the work is comprised of the connection and stretching of photographic samples of an old crystal vase from my grandfather’s home. These segments were photographed at various angles under diverse lighting conditions, later becoming the envelope of the work. When I begin work on a digital sculpture, I always think about how it is going to look from a single camera viewpoint. But the final outcome of the process lies between image and sculpture, since the initial action is a sculptural act, although the result is flat.”

Fluman’s installation is consequently a space of consciousness sometimes standing as a surrealist backdrop to a clinic, while at other times, as a space of proofs of memory of a potential body. Time and the body are absent in the works, leaving only the supports. Fluman raises issues of the image coming into being and concepts of space, on what is between the concrete and the simulated fabric curtain as compared to the digitally-sculpted mattress Soft Green. Through her actions, Fluman opens the gap between the photographed object and its concretization; within the field she opens up, she creates a simulacrum of the object, created not from displacement from the field of reality into the simulated, but out of an entanglement of meanings she structures in layers of narrative flickers and reference points from her private iconography.

The territory Fluman creates connects evidence to absence, linking the support to the supported, and transforming the support into the subject – the image bearing the body. In this context, we may remember the series of videos in the Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney (the muscle covering the testis). The images convey a sense of materiality which is convincing, which seduces the viewer into an attempt to take hold of the object. And yet that very seductive physicality ends, fading away into the flat, simulated field of the printed object.

Avi Ifergan