What am I supposed to tell you? Well, I certainly won’t name the exhibition “Eden”.
Though, actually, that would probably bring to mind some kind of brothel – so, in a way, it would even fit. But tell me, don’t they remind you of fruits? Like little fuck-fruits?
Saying: “Pick me, take me home.”
You see, I wanted to provoke a gesture like Eve’s – of taking action.

By the way, it turns out that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a mistranslation. Someone messed up and couldn’t find the right word. Because in Hebrew “yada” supposedly means “to master” or “to take control over something.” So, it turns out that their sin was more about wanting to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. To establish their own values. Not that they disobeyed the prohibition. It would be a sin of blasphemy, not disobedience. And this is all about self-determination – it took us a long time to get there, didn’t it?
So, it turns out that it all boils down to this: if you want to be kinky in bed – you can, and no one can say anything about it. You want to tie someone up, spank them? That’s your business. Someone fought for the right to do that long before you.

It’s funny because…
You see, with this tying up, it’s not like it’s my fetish. No, nothing like that. I actually have a phobia – I’m afraid my elbows will be tied together. Man, it terrifies me, the thought that I wouldn’t be able to move my elbows apart.

The tying things came from this time my neighbor came over and showed me his collection of African fetishes. You know, the religious ones, not the sexual ones. And they were often bound. And since these little pictures are supposed to have the same relationship to the large paintings as devotional objects to religious icons – I started binding them.
There’s something super-sensual about it. You know, the tension of the rope, how it digs into the paint. And also that… fleeting focus on each little picture. You approach each one with a fresh mind and think about how to solve it. I mean tie it – but solve it in the sense of a puzzle. I can easily imagine a shaman enchanting a fetish like that. Or, of course, tenderly tying someone up in bed. I really got into it.
Recently, another thread emerged. A painter pointed out to me that there’s something of dreamcatchers in this. And when you think about it, it’s funny that both religious-magical fetishes, erotic fetishes, and dreamcatchers share two common elements. Rope and a fantasy. In English, the word works broader: “dream”.
Much better, right?

And about the tree? About that tree, just one more thought: imagine this – Eve plucked the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (“Mastery”), and Odin hanged himself, pierced by the spear of Draupnir, on a tree to master knowledge. Maybe it was the same tree… Who knows, maybe even Jormungandyr himself urged the poor girl to help herself to the fruit. And the Norns, watching from the sidelines, had long foreseen that this is how things would unfold.