INTERNAL BORDERS

Internal Borders

32 Edgewood Gallery, Yale School of Art

October 17 – November 30

Hours: M, W-Sun: 1-6pm; closed Tuesdays
203-432-2600

Note: exhibition will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday recess, Nov. 17 through 25, reopening Monday, Nov. 26.

On display:

Sophie Calle: The Eruv of Jerusalem. Photographs, table, map, text, 1996.

Shirin Neshat: Turbulent, double-projection video, 1998.

http://www.yale.edu/ism/eruv/

Sophie Calle, L'Eruv de Jerusalem appears courtesy of the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme de Paris. The exhibition was sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University.

The installations at the 32 Edgewood Gallery move beyond the metaphor of the eruv
to explore the consequences of the notion of borders for
interpersonal relations. In the gallery, a broken border of
eruv markers suggests the breaking up of the space of the
eruv. It surrounds the space on three sides and continues
down the adjoining corridor as if to leave the room. Two
installations, adjoining in the space like courtyard eruvin,
each represent borders, at the same time trespassing them
in unique ways.

In preparation for L’erouv de Jérusalem, Sophie Calle asked
Arab and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem to show her public
places that they regarded as private. In the installation,
photographs of eruv poles in Jerusalem surround a map
marked with their stories and photographs of their places.
Other than their location within the eruv, the stories have
nothing ostensibly to do with it. Yet all concern outer borders
that become inner limitations. A young girl does not
leave her private space to enter the street where, as she can
see from her window, a stranger sits on a bench hoping that
she will come to talk to him. Someone looks longingly over
a border, but to cross it would mean literally stepping into
a minefield. To move from “our” space into “their” space
allows a young man to engage in activities forbidden in
his own society. To peruse these stories about people and
pictures of deserted public spaces is to become aware that
the lives of Calle’s interviewees are saturated by the awareness
of impassable borders, signaled by the nearly invisible,
ostensibly open, yet fully internalized, eruv border.

It is appropriate to end by exiting the eruv altogether and
considering the consequences of internalized borders in
other contexts in the wider world. Shirin Neshat’s double-
projection video installation Turbulent shows the harshness
of the divide between men and women in contemporary
Iran. While on one screen a male singer sings a lovely ballad
to a crowded hall where male listeners fill every seat, on
the opposite screen a woman faces an empty auditorium.
As he finishes his love song and takes his bow, however, the
singer is distracted by unearthly sounds, a ecstatic wordless
music coming from the woman on the other screen. He
stands, spellbound and silenced by her raw emotion, while
the viewer is transfixed between the two.

Turbulent may seem to be merely a political critique of
Iranian culture, where women are forbidden to sing
to audiences, but its immense power, which leaves the
viewer at an impasse between the two worlds of men and
women, implies universal internalized borders that leave
all of us, individually, communally, in our nation states
and our neighborhoods, looking across impassable, yet
tantalizing borders.