Bar-Lev’s performance deals with a crack in the floor, extending from the closed space of the store to the public space outside – a crack that wishes to burst itself open, and which Bar-Lev gradually fills with Vaseline. Engaging formally with concrete space and with images of the body, Bar-Lev invokes grim female experiences: humiliation, physical slavery and sexual slavery.
September 2004
Her Audience
Bar-Lev crawls and traps herself under Performance Art Platform’s tribune seats, using the dense array of wooden boards tied around her body. Her actions and body language are meant to point out the tension between cultivated appearances and primal animalistic aggression, whereas the meaning of these actions is derived from their temporal and spatial context in relation to the audience.
February 2005
Sumo
The body in Bar-Lev’s performance functions within a space that resembles a transformed closet, a coffin, or a dark, magical cabinet – a space in which the more the body vanishes in layers of clothing, the more it creates its own expanding presence. As this activity progresses, the internal tension between disappearance and expansion increases its internal density.
