Fight, Flight or Freeze
Solo show at Hamidrasha Gallery, 2019
Curator Avi: Lubin
Regev Amrani’s installation includes three rooms: in the first room, the spectator enters a dark space with an installation, which is the corner of a bathroom illuminated with fluorescent light and paved with ceramic tiles. In the corner, which looks like a movie set, stands a bathtub full of water. Loudspeakers are attached to its outside edges playing a low sound that sends vibrations through the bathtub and creates movement in the water. The loudspeakers are attached to cables that lead the spectator to the next room and attach the bathtub to a plexiglas screen, on which a movie is projected. In the third and illuminated room of the installation Amrani built a mechanical device that fills two bags/pillows with air and then sucks the air out of them and empties them. Amrani’s installation reconstructs the physical-emotional mechanism of dealing with danger. The title – “Fight, Flight, or Freeze" – comes from the areas of physiology and psychology. It refers to the physical-psychological survival mechanism that comes into play in the face of a danger that requires an instant response. After the senses identify the danger they send signals to the brain, and the body responds in one of three ways depending on the nature of the danger: fight, flight or freeze in place, so that the source of the danger does not notice you. This mechanism is sometimes activated even when we are not facing a real physical danger but psychological stress or anxiety. In this kind of stress, several physical systems work in concert: pupils are dilated, heart and breath rates are accelerated, and sweating increases.
Amrani's installation attempts to reconstruct the mechanism. The projection system he created is based on the 18th-century camera obscura mechanism and works like a human eye, which identifies the danger and transmits it to the body. With this mechanism, he projects a video comprised of three scenes or three events: in one scene, a young man appears with a dog. He walks to the edge of a cliff, and there, standing in front of the open sea and looking at the moon, he lustfully licks a plate. In the second scene, a taxi with its engine running waits in front of a house with an open door. In the third scene, a handcuffed and blindfolded man appears. He asks in Arabic: has the sun set yet? These are three events that supposedly reconstruct the three options: fight, flight, or freeze, the three kinds of dangers, and the three kinds of reactions. Amrani processes these events, which combine a biographical memory with a fantasy or fiction, a bubbling traumatic memory, or anxiety threatening to explode, through a sort of emotional digestive system in which traumatic memory, impulses, and desires are filtered through a mechanism that tries to filter, sanitize and clean them, and discharge the physical experience of the traumatized body from what its eyes have seen.
Text by Avi Lubin
Space 1
Acrylic bath, drywall, wooden construction, speakers, subwoofer, porcelain tiles, bathtub faucet, and water.
Space 2
Video Installation view
A plexiglas board, a black wooden fixture, Selfie stick with a mirror and a black leather strap.
Space 3
Two bags swell for 20 seconds, then sucked and shrink for 40 seconds in a slow, gentle motion.
The Arduino system synchronizes two air compressors in timing through pipes into bags made of four layers of cloth and nylon.
Two blowers, a pipe system, and sacks of fabric and Nylon