Bone Grafting

2017

Curator: Tali Ben-Nun. Commissioned and first shown as a special project at the Fresh Paint 2017 art fair, and later presented in an expanded display in the central hall of the Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem. Bone Grafting is a site-specific installation, modular and Dadaist in spirit. Inbal Hoffman composes a sculptural environment in which the spirit of a Renaissance “Cabinet of Curiosities” meets a collection of everyday objects stripped of any aura. The installation's deranged internal logic rests on a “continuum of consciousness” — a closed circuit that feeds and evolves out of itself. Under her hand, the meeting of IKEA, discount-store goods and household waste with organic elements becomes a fantastical hybrid: between the domestic and the scientific, the botanical and the bureaucratic, the natural and the synthetic. The objects behave like “actors” on a slightly nonsensical theatrical set, submitting to the new uses Hoffman assigns them. Invention, improvisation and play fill the work with small logical landmines and enigmatic, humorous traps. The whole composition is built from small, mischievous sculptural situations that connect to one another — with straws, IV lines, irrigation tubes or branches — forming an associative sequence that rolls and grows from limb to limb. The closer we look, the more we doubt the mechanism; the further back we step, the more clearly we see the construction holding it all up.