Othering

After the exhibitions of Yael Bartana and Gabor Kristof, Roy Efrat (*1979) is the third artist to present a solo show at WANNSEE CONTEMPORARY that directly explores the past, present, and future of Wannsee – the district in the southwest of Berlin that gives the gallery its name. For Efrat, it’s also about placing himself – as a Jewish Israeli with German roots – in relation to the waters of Wannsee, which carry a deep symbolic and historical weight. This includes, but isn’t limited to, themes of belonging and gender.

In his colorful and abstract works, Efrat engages with both a myth from Jewish tradition and a figure from ancient Greek mythology: the Dybbuk and Hera. In Jewish belief, a Dybbuk is an evil spirit of the dead that enters the body of the living and causes irrational behavior – and in many of these stories, the affected person is a woman. More recently, in 2015, filmmaker Marcin Wrona connected the Dybbuk to the Holocaust, treating it as a symbol of repressed evil. Hera, in Greek mythology, renews her virginity each year through a ritual bath, and is also seen as a goddess connected to menstruation. The idea of connecting flowing water or fluidity with femininity and with queer identity and behavior has deep cultural roots across many societies. But this connection is often portrayed as dangerous or forbidden, just like the figure of the female Dybbuk. While explicitly one work includes the image of a “water woman,” it is in the painted male bodies, which appear partially submerged and in states of transformation, that Efrat explores these themes. The paintings themselves undergo a process—one that blurs boundaries between body and medium, presence and absence, visibility and erasure—through which the unconscious, the forbidden, and the demonized are overlaid.

This is where the use of Augmented Reality (AR) comes into play. Efrat uses this technology in a different way than usual. Instead of pulling viewers into a fake digital world where the line between real and imaginary becomes blurry, he uses AR to reveal something else entirely – to make visible what is usually hidden or pushed away: the parts of ourselves and our societies that are seen as strange, suppressed, or threatening. In doing so, he flips the usual commercial use of AR on its head, using it to raise deeper questions about how we deal with what is different – both socially and personally.

With this, he sends a message to his audience: instead of trying to absorb or erase what is different, we should – especially now, in times of growing ‘anti-woke’ politics in the US and Europe – be showing, honoring, and living it more openly than ever. When Efrat began his research in Wannsee in 2022, despite his family’s roots in Leipzig, he felt seen as the outsider: a gay jewish Israeli. Now, his first solo exhibition at WANNSEE CONTEMPORARY marks a self-assured return – one that draws on references from classical German music and literature, and brings him back to Wannsee itself, whose waters have held both the brightest and darkest moments in German history.

Christoph Willmitzer