Threat
2008-2009
Installation, 72 x 229 x 107 cm (15 x 6.2 x 4 cm each).
Materials: 4500 Soaps
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community (Inv. no. BK009182).
Visitors are invited to take a soap each (or maximum 1 soap per family).
“A communal exercise, in dialogue with an earlier piece There is No Explosives in This (2007), Threat was a small monolith composed entirely of individual bars of soap embossed with the word ‘THREAT’ which viewers […] were invited to take home. The bars of soap were fashioned in size, weight and shape to look like extra-large bricks. By calling for the soaps to be taken at discretion by any and everyone, the address of the piece is elaborated. Remaining rooted in the real, it can also simultaneously be considered as no longer automatically authored by or addressed to anyone in particular. In the taking of a soap, every participating viewer holds the prospect of engaging and sharing in a communal discourse. Notwithstanding how directed or abstract that might be, it is the hopeful triggering of the process, which is the effect embodied in every soap that is by design conjoined to the real. So piece by piece, soap by soap, can this wall of threat be dismantled? Can it be rinsed away?”
Jhaveri (S.), “To See Again and Again”, in Ed. Adajania (N.), Shilpa Gupta, Prestel Verlag, 2009, p.60.
