This Is Where I Leave You

This Is Where I Leave You
Solo exhibition (2024)

Displayed at Alfred Gallery, Tel Aviv
Curator | Hadassa Cohen
Installation images | Tal Kronkop

Press:
‘Lessons in acquiring the language of separation: Joy Bernard at Alfred Gallery’
Reut Barnea, Portfolio Magazine [September 2024]
’Joy Bernard meets us in the place beyond language’
Talking Art Magazine [September 2024]

“At the heart of Joy Bernard’s debut solo exhibition, This Is Where I Leave You, are two video installations revolving around a short film that interweaves writing, dance, movement and music and turns the gallery space into a collective yet intimate theater. The main video work grapples with the different ways in which the human body encounters grief and processes it. It follows the journey of three main characters: An orchestra conductor, a Tai-Chi master, and “The Dreamer”, portrayed by the artist – who accompanies the viewer throughout the film and fuses together its disparate parts.

While she focuses her gaze on physical practices and actions that revolve around both commonplace and surrealistic rituals, Bernard uses them to raise questions about the failure of language in moments of trauma. She attempts to provide language its own proper status within the sensual space: The mouth opens wide, the muscle flexes, and the hand gathers in everything that slipped away and was lost in the flow of speech.” - Hadassa Cohen, curator