For her first exhibition at Bendana | Pinel Gallery, Irit Batsry chose to spend the month of August “in residence”, appropriating the space of the gallery, in order to create a site-related large scale installation at the bay windows and a video installation transforming the space into a monitoring device.
The artist installed several thousands meters of entangled yellow and red industrial security tape printed with the words “Caution” and “Danger” at the bay windows, subverting their usual function. These “membranelike” structures change appearance according to the position of the viewer and the natural light. They partially obstruct the view into the gallery, where video projections are set to show passers-by’s movements captured through the security tape “curtain” by a “live” camera.
Confirming Irit Batsry’s interest in blurring the boundries between photography, sculpture and the moving image, the show includes several photographs of her security tape ephemeral sculptural forms as well as unique objects; variations on the notions of caution and danger.
This exhibition in Paris is part of the ongoing body of work “Caution/Danger” Starting in 2007, this nomadic cycle, including installations, video and photography, is enriched over time by new works, which embody the tension between the organic and the mechanical, the industrial and the craft-like, speaks of borders and transgressions, inclusion and exclusion, and question our perception and our relationship to the environment.
Irit Batsry was awarded the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award (2002), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1992) and the Grand Prix Video de Création of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001). Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries. Selected shows include the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Film Theater and the ICA, London, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Museu d’Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro and Ludwig Museum, Cologne. A retrospective of her videotapes was shown at The Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2007 and her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum in New York.
