My Place in Between

ICA London
3 July – 23 July
Reviewed by Chloe Mason-Gray

Many of us have trouble getting rid of things. As we grow older we accumulate so much stuff that we eventually rent a storage space where we dump the things that we no longer have an immediate use for but that we can’t seem to part with. Or perhaps a nomadic existence forces us to take with us only what is necessary, leaving the rest behind to collect dust in a dark room.

This is the space explored in My Place in Between, a work by artists Alys Williams and Nathalie Harb. Boxes, half-opened crates, lamps, furniture, books, collectibles and countless other objects are stuffed into a small, dimly lit room whose ceiling is so low that one is almost forced to hunch their back as they maneuver amongst the mass of carefully placed possessions. A quiet drone of whispers accompanied by the incessant sound of an airplane landing emanates from a pile of cardboard boxes stuffed with newspaper, books and photographs. From behind the opposite wall a steady drumbeat is overlaid with the intermittent cacophony of explosion. We are surrounded by noises that hint at a transience, chaos and impermanence, reverberating through a room filled with objects that speak of memories and the possibility of return.

An old wooden archive case sits next to piles of boxes and discarded junk. Several of its drawers are open to reveal detailed architectural drawings on waxed paper. At the back of one of the drawings, a small square measuring roughly an inch on each side is cut out to reveal a movie of a girl in a white dress sitting on a couch, barely moving. A powerful symbol of remembrance and a gateway to the past, an archive is perhaps the thing that best embodies the many ideas explored in this installation. It retains an expanse of time and grants access to memories, cultures and past events through interaction with physical objects.

At the back of the room is a wardrobe, inside of which are a few vintage dresses and some old shoes. If you push your head around the door you will find a grainy video projected onto the back of the wardrobe that shows a girl moving about a city, interspersed with footage of an ocean. Several other videos are found throughout the room: footage of a girl sleeping is embedded in the seat of a couch and the undulating waves of an ocean are revealed in the bottom of an empty teacup. The videos attach a sense of personal history and memory to the objects crammed into this tight space, contributing to a fragmented impression of the owners of these things. Glimpses of their owners' personal histories are revealed to us, inset like wounds into the skin of the objects.

A tale of multiple histories, disparate experiences and displaced memories is hidden amongst the detritus. A London address scrawled on an envelope, a glass bottle covered in Arabic script and the spray painted Arabic words that appear in the video hidden in the wardrobe hint at duality and translocation. These cultural signifiers are traces of the two artists’ origins: Williams is from London and Harb is from Beirut. Thus the piece tells a story of two cities; after its stay in London, My Place in Between will relocate to The Hangar of Umam D&R in Beirut. This impermanence is further communicated through the reoccurring footage of the ocean, which speaks of travel and unexplored territory. In this small, dimly lit room we are faced with the inherent instability of home in contemporary society. Something unusual happens; destinations become secondary, revealing the salience of the trails we leave behind.