Like a cave whose volume eludes the outside gaze, the right-hand room reveals its dimensions only upon entering it. The walls of the elongated rectangular room are studded with a pattern of 58 ventilation nets, from which a polyphonic jumble of voices emerges – male and female, in English and Hebrew – reciting 62 passages from Room 205(2010), Goldstein’s book of poetry, which recreates one minute of hallucination, occurring between 9:25 and 9:26 a.m., in Room no. 205 at a hotel in Tel Aviv. The same passages were used in “Haunted by Objects” (2010), Goldstein’s exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Goldstein processed the lingering impact of a traumatic hallucination, which he experienced on the bank of the Chari River, between Chad and Cameroon (described in detail in his first book, On Paper), into “Reconstructed Memories (Lariam B)”. As in a second move, he recreated the subsequent hallucination at a hotel in Tel Aviv by writing the bookRoom 205, parallel in time to the physical realization of the wall-displayed object. In light of all that, “Room 205 – The Voices,” — the conclusive move – is an orchestrated work of art built up from biographical layers, an autarchic economy of meaning that reserves to itself the monopoly over imagination, interpretation and life.

Zvi Goldstein, Haunted by Objects, Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (Opening: 13 November 2011. Curator: Julian Heynen)

See also:
Julian Heynen, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Zvi Goldstein: To Be There, Oktagon Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (1998)
Zvi Goldstein, On Paper, Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter König, Köln, 2004
Zvi Goldstein, Room 205, Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter König, Köln, 2010

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