Salonnièr #1
Ayelet Amrani Navon
I feel safe in the World | I don’t feel safe in the World
Ayelet Amrani Navon
I feel safe in the World | I don’t feel safe in the World
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The artistic action by Ayelet Amrani Navon at Rotem Salon Berlin unfolds as an intimate performance within a “therapeutic–ritual” space. The audience is invited into one-to-one supportive and protective“therapeutic” encounter. At the core of this act of “healing”, stands in tension two sentences: I feel safe in the World | I don’t feel safe in the World. These pair of statements trace the fragile spectrum of the human perception of safety. Amrani Navon brings a gesture of oil and heat to Berlin. Through the use of skin-to-skin touch, rue oil from the desert, and a cocoon-like wrapping, the artist creates a holding environment: a space where one can examine their personal relationship to safety, control, and vulnerability.
Amrani Navon weaves a multicultural resonance into her artwork. On the one hand, her Yemenite family heritage is embodied in the use of rue oil (shadab), extracted from a medicinal plant believed to carry protective and healing qualities warding off “evil spirits” and strengthening both body and mind. On the other hand, the work draws on the legacy of Ernst Simmel, one of the leading psychoanalysts in early 20th-century Germany, who operated the Psychoanalytic Poliklinik in Berlin between 1920 and 1933. Simmel offered free psychoanalytic treatment to the public and worked extensively with war trauma. He articulated the idea of a “protective cocoon” as a necessary first condition of feeling absolutely secure: a holding environment without which no exploration of wound or trauma can take place. The understanding that “Safety must precede exploration” is not only a therapeutic principle but a structure of human encounter. This principle resonates directly within the performance: the artist first creates the sanctuary, and only then opens up a space for the question to emerge. The touch of oil and the traces left on dedicated paper during the session transform the performative act into a bridge between traditional healing and artistic ritual, moving between personal and collective history, between early psychoanalysis and ancient desert healing practices. Within this setting, the artist assumes the role of an attendant, while the participant enters the position of witness and a receiver of care. The artwork itself exists in the shared space that opens between them. Against a background of instability, migration, and a collective memory of rupture, the performance does not seek to cure but to pause, to offer a moment of compassion, listening, and gentle inquiry: where does each of us stand between the two poles: I feel safe in the World | I don’t feel safe in the World. |
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Ayelet Amrani Navon (b. 1970) explores themes of transience and intimacy. Contemplating what it means to be human, in a human body, and what it means to encounter another.
By means of painting, sculpture, and installation, Amrani Navon constructs environments that contain “a place to meet” where human connection can be amplified. This meeting place is the site of her one-to-one performative encounters through which she attempts to achieve an “accelerated friendship”, a certain alchemy. The encounter consists of rituals based on sensory stimulation, talk, and principles of psychoanalytic theory.
Amrani Navon’s practice draws on her personal biography, her mixed identity as a woman of Middle Eastern/Arabian (Yemenite) and Western (North American) origins. The story of her Yemenite grandmother who migrated across the Arabian desert on foot and her own frequent travel from very early childhood, back and forth between Israel and the US, have left her with an ingrained sense of impermanence, questioning attachment to land alongside a longing for a “place’.
Amrani Navon attended Basis School of Art, Israel (Top Honors Graduate) and the Tel-Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ Interdisciplinary Program. She holds an LLB from Tel-Aviv University Law School and was a Bar member in NY, California and Israel.
Her work has been presented internationally, mainly in not-for-profit spaces: artist run, municipal and museums including, MUZA Eretz Israel Museum, The Umm el-Fahem Art Museum, the New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation Gallery and The Saatchi Gallery in London.
By means of painting, sculpture, and installation, Amrani Navon constructs environments that contain “a place to meet” where human connection can be amplified. This meeting place is the site of her one-to-one performative encounters through which she attempts to achieve an “accelerated friendship”, a certain alchemy. The encounter consists of rituals based on sensory stimulation, talk, and principles of psychoanalytic theory.
Amrani Navon’s practice draws on her personal biography, her mixed identity as a woman of Middle Eastern/Arabian (Yemenite) and Western (North American) origins. The story of her Yemenite grandmother who migrated across the Arabian desert on foot and her own frequent travel from very early childhood, back and forth between Israel and the US, have left her with an ingrained sense of impermanence, questioning attachment to land alongside a longing for a “place’.
Amrani Navon attended Basis School of Art, Israel (Top Honors Graduate) and the Tel-Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ Interdisciplinary Program. She holds an LLB from Tel-Aviv University Law School and was a Bar member in NY, California and Israel.
Her work has been presented internationally, mainly in not-for-profit spaces: artist run, municipal and museums including, MUZA Eretz Israel Museum, The Umm el-Fahem Art Museum, the New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation Gallery and The Saatchi Gallery in London.