Lea van Hall

“[…] and my mind is like a hand, it touches rather than thinks” (from The Employees by Olga Ravn) It’s just you and your imagination, and your heart is beating fast as you allow the story to take over. There’s a darkness to it, something forbidden but exciting. It’s soft and warm, yet hard and cold; it feels right but wrong at the same time. The installation captures the tension around staging violent scenarios with toys and games that don’t suggest violence themselves and read aesthetically as rather cute. Through interaction and embodiment, the viewer explores play anecdotes from other people's childhoods and experiences the friction that comes with testing boundaries. Where does the desire to be cruel to toys come from and what is being negotiated through this type of play?