Hansen | הנסן

A sculptural video installation by Daniella Meroz transforms the spaces of Mamuta into a grotesque gymboree, characterized by exaggerated and distorted playfulness and ritualism. The exhibition’s title, Hole in the Heart, touches on the experience of rupture and absence on an intimate level, while also echoing a collective experience. Play and sport are perceived as universal arenas, yet they are deeply embedded in national narratives. Similarly, Meroz’s work moves between the local and the universal, between the private and the public, between the individual body and the group.

Meroz’s works are characterized by a strong presence of enlarged and voluminous bodies and objects, with the motif of the hole serving as a central formal and conceptual element. The hole is an empty space that appears in each of the objects – sometimes expressed as an absent face, and sometimes as an opening in the area of the heart. This is not merely a design detail, but a recurring presence throughout the exhibition that connects the body to memory and emotional experience.

Sports competitions and games are perceived as spaces of amusement and leisure, but in practice, throughout history they have enabled a space in which social ideals were formulated. Sport presented models of power, discipline, control, and beauty, and converted violence and aggression into measured action. In her work, Meroz brings together the gymnasium and the stadium, the aesthetics of the ancient Olympic Games – the cradle of democracy – and the sporting spectacle parades of fascist regimes. In doing so, she continues an artistic tradition directly influenced by Bauhaus ideas and the attempt to examine the relationships between human beings and their environment through art, design, and architecture. Like the Bauhaus artists, Meroz regards the body not as an isolated entity but as part of a broader system of spatial and social relations.

Meroz’s video works are imbued with color and formal sensuality. The figures are simultaneously toned and flabby, playing, wrestling, and competing with one another. Meroz breaks through the boundaries of the body and blurs its physical and gendered structure through “body masks” –  exaggerated coverings that elongate and distort basic body forms. Body parts become cylinders and inflated spheres. The mummified body, whose movement is restricted, operates within defined and marked spaces -tracks, courts, and playing fields. The actions themselves are reduced to absurd, repetitive task-like movements between lines and boundaries.