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HILA LULU LIN Hila Lulu Lin is considered one of the most interesting and promising artists in contemporary Israeli art. Much of her work focuses on the human body, and she often uses herself as both subject and object in her video, photography, installation, poetry and performance. Her work is a highly personal exploration of how the body can be manipulated, what happens when it comes into contact with objects, and what these objects evoke. Her unique work is characterized by a contemporary, subversive, post-feminist tone
In one of her books of poetry, Shririm (2000), Hila Lulu Lin wrote the following: "foreign foreigness foreignness / we thought that / was that / that's the code / for all this remoteness / the art / the noise in the heart." The words "foreign foreigness foreignness" alongside "this remoteness", "the art / the noise in the heart" – were introduced by the artist as a code, which I now wish to adopt in order to discuss her work. Thus, in a few words, I shall introduce her now: foreign foreigness foreignness – a rare breed, alien corn, an orphan in Israeli art. (Tami Katz-Freiman)
Lin presented No More Tears, an iconic video piece, later to become a Lulu Linian trademark. At the time I dubbed her aesthetic "vomit aesthetic," and called her act involving the egg-yolk "anorectic acrobatics." In the spirit of the entire exhibition, the work's interpretation was channeled in feminist directions: "The work documents the endless journey of a yolk, that crawls slowly along her arms, climbs to the shoulder, enters the mouth, emitted fully, reverts to rolling on the palm of her hand, and so on and so forth. An never-ending loop of reception and emission, between pleasure and strangulation, trickery that requires an exceptional control over the body, complete concentration (lest it burst in her mouth); not to swallow, nor to vomit. Lulu Lin … attempts to unravel the familiar links between woman-food-body-flesh-matter, to take control anything that is likely to penetrate. […] The body is perceived here as an infinite, fluid and evasive territory, that allows another body (the egg) to slide over its surface without actual penetration.“ (Tami Katz-Freiman) Detail, No More Tears, Video, 1994.
In 1996, Lin crossed the line from the private to the public in a radical, acute manner in her triptych Cold Blood: A Poem in Three Parts (1996), created especially for the exhibition "Desert Cliché: Israel Now, Local Images" (Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida, and other museums in the US, 1996-1998). The work was created a moment before the Rabin assassination, upon Benjamin Netanyahu's rise to power in 1996. The sky of the Middle East, over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, like the artist's eyes, was exposed, bloody meat. My Eyes, dimension variable
Al-Aqsa Mosque Jerusalem, 100X100 Tel Aviv- Jaffa Beach, 100X100
I am counting. In front of me are sixteen square photographs, witch I have, in turn, arranged in a square. When I opened the package of images, the size of a CD case, I knew there would be sixteen. It is a kind of magic logical square, full of permutations , affirmations, negations, different forms of quantifiers, converses, contrapositives, subalterns, inverses, inverts, inversions. Everything here is about a round number, about roundness: numbers, eyes, breasts, egg yolk, heads, Eve-fruit , golf ball, nostrils, a mouth with cutting white teeth.The round things all fit into the individual squares of the images as well as the big square, witch I myself have constructed, in this game of solitaire I am playing with Lulu. Cercal in a square. Round peg in square hole. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. (Thomas Pepper)
A Drop of Milk Acco festival of Alternative Theater, 2002 A long and winding underground tunnel leads to a labyrinthine set of spaces where the institution Tipat Halav1 has been set up for a three-day period. The figures that populate the institute operate simultaneously in all the spaces, performing monotonous and Sisyphean actions, self-absorbed, as part of a punishment they were made to serve. Music, texts, and video projections blend in various areas of the institute. The viewer was invited to construct for himself the progression route. The Young Guard 2 stands at the end of the tunnel, cracking sunflower seeds and handing out the guiding words to the audience, shifting the crosswalk lines, piling up a barrier of sorts between the milk bar and the white space. Next to him is the Monster from the Kibbutz, filling the inside of her skin with fresh stones, moving in an endless route inside the institute. The Public Servant3 operates the wine machine and recounts the story of his life. The Red Feather Scatterer stands on the watchtower, looking into the silent sea of feathers. A boy and girl dressed in black move in a dance of jesting-embrace on a narrow metal bed in a coal-black space. A man and a woman in white underwear stand in a bright space with their feet immersed in granular salt, passing a red thread and chopped lines of words through a hole in the wall standing between them. A milk bar at whose end, on a high throne, sits the Bookkeeper – the decider of fates – distributing sweet or salty cookies. A lost, hairy barmaid is tied to him by her tail – pouring milk to the audience in illuminated glasses set in a long row, her face is concealed and her eye – watchful. And finally the men in green uniforms walk about the institute, caring for everyone.
SHE 2008 N & N Aman gallery
Hila Lulu Lin creates magical, sensual, fanciful worlds, weaving one detail into another via meticulous, strenuous work. She offers viewers an experience where color and matter, sound and human voice, myth and legend fuse into stimulating, sweeping physical and emotional totality. The power of imagination and beauty strikes one abruptly, yet surrender to her world is ambiguous rather than total, sustaining and gap which is the focus of this essay. Alongside an ostensible promise for an experience of a unified world which dissolves all barriers between object and subject, one is troubled by some incongruity, a sense of alienation or an ironically implied wink. Unlike the Surrealists, whose sphere of images and strategies is seemingly pertinent to her work, Lulu Lin herself deviates from the image sphere. (Galia Bar Or)
WONDERFUL WORLD, 2012 N & N Aman gallery
Hila Lulu Lin's "A Wonderful World" is a promise which leads viewers to the edge of the abyss of an open wound. It is a dark, indrawn, intimate space where a restricted cluster of drawings, objects, and video works presents a different disconcerting world, incessantly alluding to this world. "A Wonderful World" insists on formulating a jolting statement regarding the human condition in this place by constituting a threshold condition. "A Wonderful World" is a theater of alienation and estrangement consisting of drawings-paintings, thin and transparent as skin, which unfold an elegy about the future, undermining the tranquility of the present. It is an atlas of deconstructed landscapes dominated by horror and a sense of incoherence greater than ever before. The images are fragmentary, hanging by a thread, burning in their solitude. Perhaps these are mysterious plans, invisible systems which govern our lives. A crooked smile—which is a scar, exposed teeth, a Procrustean bed, a macabre entity walking amid the fragments—runs through the paintings. This smile-on-crutches, like a shadow that wanders among us, peeking behind us, is the beginning of the work of art; it is a mirror akin to Michel Foucault's heterotopia, “a kind of contestation, both mythical and real, of the space in which we live.“ (Irena Gordon)
"The Sky has Darkened" (Kadru Kadru Pnei Hashamayim), the young scouts sing in the video work, resonating ideals of sacrifice, war and death. The mythological-futuristic, woman-animal figure, imprisoned in her garment, within her own skin, marches hand in hand with the figure of living-dead youth, like Virgil with Dante, into the sea, heading toward death, or possibly rebirth. Another catastrophe takes place on the seashore amid the city's high-rises. A fire inscription reading "Help" is burning in the foreground, in the depths of the water threatening to extinguish it, but in the cycles of blindness, no one sees, no one discerns. (Irena Gordon)
Wonderful World, N & N Aman gallery , Tel Aviv, March, 2012.
Yellow Rain, 1999 The Glamorous Blow Jobber, 1998 Alien of Extraordinary Abilities, 1995 +/-(Pink with a Raven), 2000 Ein Gabot, 2004 Whatever Will Be Will Be, 1995-96 Video Works
Rising of the sunset, 2000 Washer, 1998 Use Everyday, 1998 The Glamorous Blow Jobber 2, 1998
