The Longest Night Ever
Curated by: Ruth Direktor
keitelman gallery, Brussels
2011
Nelly Agassi's face, still and frozen, surrounded by tousled hair, welcomes visitors to the gallery. Her face, familiar to those who have been following her work since the late 1990s, appears in the same format, hardly changing fromone work to the other: it captures the area between the top of her head and her chest, while she performs a single, repetitive action: washing her face
with coarse salt, rubbing her chest with sandpaper until it bleeds, smiling at length until her face muscles betray her, or turning the back of her neck towards theviewers and simply breathing. Taken together, these actions appear as aseries of private rituals that touch upon a core of pain. Or perhaps upon thevery core of her being... Reed More