“Bauchnabel”, PM Gallery, Düsseldorf, November 2018
​Curator: Victoria Tarak

An exhibitionist bat standing with a girl with braided plaits and conspicuous pups or a Turkish weightlifter with a laurel crown exposing his potency. Encountering the doll-like sculptural work creates a strange state within ourselves.
A desire to possess appears which at the same time reveal what we maybe try to suppress.
A wish of getting in touch with the made angles and gestures of human urges, humor, weakness or absurdity arises.
The exhibition Bauchnabel of the two Israeli artist’s Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin features two different bodies of work. This year’s scholarship holder of the Bronner Residence show a large scale drawing composed of multiple units together with a series of soft fabric sculptures, which create an impressive cosmos of dark, sensitive, exposing as well as humorous and imaginary aspects of individual and social experience with its limits and deficiencies.
The drawings, especially created for the exhibition space (an industrial souterrain
In Düsseldorf Oberbilk) depict a map of subjects and objects trying to relate. Similar to the Bauchnabel the single elements of the drawing together composes a connected and at the same time broken and twisted constitution.
A transformative framework of the suggestive body and gender relations, revealing an introverted space between the denuded and the hidden. What emerges is a web of personal and mythical microcosms within a moving surrealistic and emotional but also hard-boiled painterly quality.
The fabric sculptures echo folkloric traditions of doll craft which the artist’s turn into a contemporary language connected to ideas of the unconscious, sex, mythology and current politics.
The stitched bodies speak of cheeky jokes, witticisms, wordplay, and twisted historical quotes. The cautious handcraft of the sculptures and their tenderly made attributes mixed with a sometimes crappy human truth they depict, creates a contradiction. Sweetly seductive, and then thought provoking. Sculptural works dressed as supposedly harmless dolls which don’t know any blowing smoke but rather expose their or our inner state of mind.