The video installation Play in Camera (sense of sight) is about the gaze beheld in mirrors, or in the eyes of others: 3 depicted characters have all behaved in a regretful manner towards others during their lives and as punishment may dwell after death, only in the hell of digital impulse repeated in the video monitor (a fourth monitor linked to a camera in-corp-orates the spectator into the spectacle). The texts are quotations from Sartre and Beckett’s work. Beckett and Sartre were partisans during WW2.

3 stories to be heard over headphones in Play it by Ear (sense of sound) have been written by the artist herself and encompass comedy and more serious thoughts on the nature of catastrophe in unknown places (falling asleep under the sunbed, or while driving), with foreign languages (falling asleep while listening to a foreign language course), where undercurrents of racism and love betrayal are revealed.

The photo installation Ô d’Oriane (sense of smell), as with the video piece, owes its existence to literary references. This piece is dedicated to the ephemeral nature of beauty; sepia-coloured, magazine-like images of a semi-undressed stylist have been augmented with quotations from the works of Calvino and Levi that tell of the search in one’s memory to locate the exact odour of a person loved and lost long ago. The photos have been perfumed with Chanel no. 5. Unlike Coco Chanel, who was a Nazi collaborator1, Levi and Calvino were active as partisans. The allusion in this work to the individual response towards Fascism is almost subliminal, like a delicious scent or a bad smell.

The artist tells her own wicked story in Zucchini (documented on video) at her birthday party celebration in a Berlin gallery, after the guests have consumed a meal of courgette curry, prepared by her (sense of taste). The anecdote is about vegetables and sex toys and a gathering together of friends for Xmas in Cologne: 2 German Christians, 2 Palestinians and the artist herself, an Anglo-German-Jew.

Literary works are once more cited in the final piece Intimacy (sense of touch), this time from a different piece by Sartre, a pre-war short story, together with quotations from Kureishi’s contemporary British book. Both authors have taken up the same subject of intimacy and marriage breakdown, where issues surrounding (homo)sexuality and racism also play an important role.

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The senses are our bodily means to perceive the world around us. They nourish our understanding but we have the choice what to do with a life, whether we choose to behave with cruelty in our human relationships, as do most of the protagonists in all of the The Senses, which are in effect morality tales.

Tanya Ury