Documenta 14, Bonita Ely's 'Interior Decoration'
Never before seeing ‘Documenta 14’, have I suspected that the war as a socio-cultural and historical event can have such deeply inclined predispositions in human societies, as well as into the individual psyche. Walking the venues, from site to site, you can’t help but notice the repetition of political tendencies, (some events appropriated recently enough in different parts of the world). You can see the world’s systematic disability to process guilt on a major scale. Historical facts dissolve on top of each other, leaving a framework of humankind’s psycho-political traits throughout time. Not that one could have expected the world was doing great these days, but seeing samples delivered from all over the world, and documented under a glass frame had a pretty mind bending effect on me. It was quite hard to prioritize which artwork i should write about, as they were all adding to the mosaic stamp deep in my understanding of contemporary art. Maybe two artists spoke to me the most. Lorenza Böttner with his/her mouth/foot paintings and Bonita Ely with her ‘Interior Decoration’. Here I'm going to write about Bonita Ely's work.
The installation consists of four different pieces, arranged together in a single room: Sewing Machine Gun (2013), Watchtower (2013), Trench (2013), and Tour Of Duty II (2017). I’m not quite sure what strikes the most about this installation, is it the military feel combined with domestic interior, or the fact that it’s children-sized, playground like, except for the lack of playfulness. The room feels full with objects and quite empty in the same time. What should have been a home, has turned into a battleground, and battleground feels like the only home - a typical PTSD symptom. According to the description hanging on the wall, the work is actually dedicated to victims of PTSD (her own father), as well as those of domestic violence (apparently herself). The trench is made of her parents’ home furniture, the watchtower - from their bed, the machine gun - from her mother’s old Singer sewing machine with bobby pins, used as bullets (the last transformation is particularly curious, as it suggests the giving up of femininity in the times of war and crisis). The view from above allows you to witness the sites as if from an airplane perspective, which adds to the evacuation feel. The view stumbles upon a small faceless grey figure ‘hiding’ in the corner. It reminds a child, but, we’re not used to see children in a lifeless posture like this, unless they are punished or scared. The fact that every piece is ripped off and turned upside down adds another layer of alertness to the site. The roughness of the furniture, its rigid functionality speaks of a home deprived of joy. A silent and empty post-traumatic space, where all you do is live in the past. One can vividly imagine a child’s imagination affected by it’s parents’ traumatic behaviour. If the child’s whole world is confined to that single room, we could judge about it’s psychic state by the positioning of the objects inside in that particularly patriarchal manner: the watchtower (for censoring of uncontrolled sprouts of emotion) probably represents the authority of a father figure, a figure that silently observes and gives orders; the gun (for direct execution of punishment) could easily be symbolising the mother with her passive-aggressive behaviour and submissive soothing strategies for keeping the authority satisfied, and the trench (a shelter from the parents’ anger), where the child reanimates between battles. There’s an old metal rabbit trap hanging close to the ‘child’ in the trench, as a torture device ready to be used if needed. The ‘child’ is depicted in grey shades, lifeless. The strap of pictures on the wall also have a military context. We see real watchtowers, weapons, and railways. We also see the names of victims of the holocaust, HENRIETTE PLAUT, SELMA GOLDSCHMIDT, JOHANNA PHILIPPS, JULIUS ROSENBAUM, all of them transported from Kassel to Terezin -a former military fortress composed of citadel and adjacent walled garrison town, that the nazi turned into the ‘Theresienstadt concentration camp’, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Most of these people died in Terezin, some were transported to Treblinka or Auschwitz, and then exterminated in gas chambers or shot. The concentration camp held up to 150 000 inmates. In the honor of Kassel’s victims of the holocaust, their names were engraved on the rails in the city’s former train station KulturBahnhof.
The parallels between a concentration camp and the more subtle, sometimes non verbal domestic violence, the feeling of isolation, rejection, emotional deprivation, or any other ‘social torture devices’, used to control, or silence, are uncountably many. Some of them are palpable with the first look upon the work. The citadel-like trench hides as many dark secrets behind its walls as the family does, hidden behind its inviolable sacred status. Social taboos seem to enforce its immunity, for better or worse. By turning a socially established unit like ‘the home’ upside down and showing its unexamined, darker side, involving invisible strings of power and authority, held by the parental elements, Bonita Ely succeeds to provoke the viewer’s own inner child and pleads for a more critical investigation of long accepted norms and social roles, that look a bit rusty and outdated after you’ve seen them in the light of such dramatic context. Just like in the time of holocaust disinformation and lack of awareness were the key to a successful propaganda and eventually - genocide, not being alert about what happens behind doors, in domestic environment, not having the tools and, moreover, the access to trace and treat epigenetically transmitted disorders or traumas may have irreversible implications. Political correctness, gender roles, passive-aggressive manipulation, all these hypocritical concepts of our contemporary world need urgent revision. The artist gives us the critical look, it’s up to us to be alert, or the Singer machine gun may one day turn against us.
