About Rotem Tamir’s project Acoustic Cabin

By omri zin

In Rotem Tamir’s work there is an acoustic booth that is placed in the center of the space, and in it there are objects of a similar material nature hanging and scattered on the floor. Their form is a kind of testimony to a geometric-organic capitulation or shrinkage. Some of them resemble internal organs while others a process of disintegration, yet they remain unfamiliar in their form and material. A closer look at the objects reveals a mouth-piece of what looks to be a balloon at the edge of each one, an implication that the present state of the object is only the edge of a process. Located around the booth are speakers and recording equipment, though the only sound they transmit is the one made by the viewers entering the booth.

Between the booth, the balloons and the recording device, a poetic landscape emerges with boundaries that are not easily defined and an order that is not easily decoded. It seems unclear whether we are roaming through a field of ruins or held up in a state of alertness, either way the main question remains unsolved: ruins of what? Alert to what? The work requires the viewer to be in an attentive state, but unlike other sound pieces, it does not provide a response, but in fact just the opposite. There is a feeling that great measures have been taken to constitute an event that lacks any happening, but merely a potential of a happening, a state of anticipation as a final state. In so, the work functions as a live metaphor and draws a linking line between the process of producing art, and viewing a work of art, positioning both on a frozen timeline, yearning for a big bang, and no way of measuring the appointed time of its occurrence.