Isabella Benshimol Toro at Les Vitrines, Institut français de Berlin / Berlin

Artist(s): Isabella Benshimol Toro
Curator: Indira Béraud
Art space: Les Vitrines, Institut français de Berlin
Address: Kurfürstendamm 211, 10719 Berlin, Germany
Duration: 13/02/2025 - 20/06/2025
Credits: Luca Girardini

The solo exhibition of Isabella Benshimol Toro, Le Fantôme de la Liberté, takes its title from Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist film, which subversively deconstructs, with irony and provocation, the social and moral norms that govern society. Overlooking Kurfürstendamm, the cross-section of an apparently typical apartment—featuring a bedroom, a bathroom, a hallway, an entrance, and an office—becomes the stage for a tension between private and public spheres. The site-specific installation, composed of a selection of sculptures and photographs, incorporates fragments of everyday life. Created from architectural elements, furniture, lingerie, worn clothing, and various textiles set in epoxy resin or silicone, these pieces inhabit the space with a spectral presence. Each one seems to bear the memory, the fluids, or the forms of an absent body, revealing an implicit narrative, petrified in time. Benshimol Toro transforms Les Vitrines into a tableau of a domestic interior, where fossils or monuments of banal gestures take the form of fixed images. These unfold like a film strip that comes to life with the rhythm of passing footsteps. By intensifying the boundary between what must be shown or concealed, the exhibition is activated under the voyeuristic gaze of pedestrians, while authority and conventions, laid bare, reveal their intrinsic absurdity. The absent walls and suggested spaces create a raw transparency, where power dynamics become visible, and intimacy appears more political than ever.