'Ruth Sacks' by Alessandro Iazeolla Reinvented objects: words made image, images converted into objects, objects transformed into metaphors. The creations of a promising young artist of South African origin... We wander, as if among the islands of an archipelago, passing through the gallery rooms, drawn by the different landscapes we encounter. Something is accumulated on each island, as if brought in the course of time by the sea: something we have to decipher. Words made images, images converted into objects, objects transformed into metaphors. We’ve entered the geography of Ruth Sacks (Port Elizabeth, 1977: she now lives in Brussels). She appeared in the African Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale and has had several solo shows abroad, the most recent at the Cortex Athletico in Bordeaux. Now Ruth is in Rome for her first monographic exhibition. It’s a collection of objects, an accumulation of ideas and messages whose interaction suggests the work method of an artist who is continually urged to modify her own action, consequently modifying the legibility and enjoyableness of her works. So, in the white sand spread on the gallery floor we suddenly recognise the outline of the Pantheon, at once floating and dissolved in its own calcareous dust (Pooling Dust). On one side, like bottles tossed into the sea by castaways, a series of small, identical wooden caskets are lined up. Might they perhaps contain, like those bottles, messages from other places and another age? Exactly so. We learn this by reading the instructions set next to the work which ask the speculated possessor to carry out certain actions, but only in a very distant year that is carved on each lid. In this way the artist makes the work a sort of arc extended in time and space, an action requested, suspended, uncertain and hoped for, like the one the castaway entrusts to the sea (At the Moment). And while the sea carries those messages, it ceaselessly erodes, drags and accumulates material. Just as its waves deposit lost and dried-up objects on the shore – such as shells – so Ruth lines up little bells in a showcase, bells collected who knows where or when and, like the shells themselves, emptied of their raison d’ętre: the clapper, the part that makes them ring. They are the skeletons of what, in domestic South African culture, becomes the symbol of a distinction between social classes, to which the artist alludes by distributing each detached pendulum in an orderly manner and in a separate display case at the side. Elsewhere, casting our eyes over the gallery landscape, ephemeral writings stand out. On the one hand the long description set in planimetric form, “The Biggest Sculpture in the World”, and on the other the two signs “Alatoseum/Musealato”. Messages destined for cancellation, just as they would be if they were traced in the sand of Ruth’s imaginary beach. The place and non-place of her accumulations. Iaceolla, A. 2010. 'Ruth Sacks': Exibart. Year XIX no 64. pp. 65 (translated from the Italian)
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