Einat Amir – Enough About You

EINAT AMIR
ENOUGH ABOUT YOU

17-19 February 2011
Duration: 13 min
Guards /Participants: Ida Mårhed, Pether Lindgren
The performance was shown several times a night for 20 people at the time.

” – When did you last have an intimate conversation with a complete stranger?”

The new performance Enough About You is created as a sensuous venue and an observatory for physical encounters, which is controlled by a predetermined template. In the work Amir is exploring the meeting as a real action and as an image, from a traditional starting point of two people, face to face.

Five white boxes are placed in a white clinical room. Twenty people at a time are directed into the bright room and are requested to line up next to each other. Two guides dressed in black are thoroughly choosing two people at a time and leading them into the small and narrow rooms. Fully exposed through a glass wall they are waiting for instructions from a synchronized loudspeaker system:

– Welcome strangers, you are being watched but no one can hear you.
– You are about to be asked a series of questions. Please share your answers with each other. You will have a limited amount of time to answer each question.

The spectators who were not chosen to go into the boxes are standing against the entrance wall, observing the couples that were inserted into the boxes: With a tentative body language they start to converse politely to each other. Every movement, facial expression, and emotional shift of the room inhabitants is completely exposed, but not a single word or sound can be grasped from the outside. At times the dialogues break and the body movements are changing simultaneously. The couples inside the boxes are crossing their arms over their chests, dancing and taking each other’s hands, caressing each other’s cheek. The nature of the questions is gradually changing from standard questions to deeper and more personal. The pairs seem to come closer to one another. They laugh, talk confidentially and listen concentrated to each other. When 13 minutes had past they are led out of boxes and guided out through a side door of the space.

Einat Amir’s (born in Jerusalem, 1979 lives in New York and Tel Aviv) work is infused by a great interest in contemporary social – political issues. Amir efficiently sets the reality against the fiction and allows the viewer to take the responsibility of setting their own limits, by creating choices for them to be confronted with.

Link to the artist website: http://einatamir.com/

Enough About You was shown at MAXXI performance festival in Rome, 15 -16 October 2016 as the last step on an ongoing collaboration between Lilith Performance Studio, TRIAD: Toward Regional Integration of Artistic Development and MAXXI Museum in Rome.
fondazionemaxxi.it/en/events/enough-about-you-di-einat-amir/  And in 2015  Enough About You had its UK premiere in London on 9th of October launched by TRIAD: Toward Regional Integration of Artistic Development. http://www.thetriad.org.uk/  The performance has also been shown at ACTS – the annual international performance event at the Contemporary art Museum in Roskilde, Roskilde festival in 2012