Teresa Diehl
Tripoli
by Manon Slome

Teresa Diehl’s work is a hallucinatory feast for the senses – smell, texture, sound, touch, visuality itself, are stretched and played before the viewer like a hand slowly caressing a pelt of fur. In her “Intimacy and Discomfort” series, the body is experienced in strangely unfamiliar ways: close ups of a child suckling or an intimate caress, serve to both seduce the viewer into the closeness of the encounter yet cause a concomitant discomfort, less for being viewed while viewing, than for the utter unknowabitly of the body. This sense of disorientation is magnified by her installations which create labyrinths of plexi through which the viewer must walk to access the piece and which in turn cause multiple reflections which further complicate our orientation to the work.

Diehl’s sculptural installations made from glycerin soap continue the sensual challenge of her work. At once solid and transparent, light filled or opaque, the material challenges the form, be it military helicopters or missiles, through being part of the substance of weaponry and a cleansing from the contamination of the same. While the soap might clean, it also leaves a residue when touched as though to suggest one can never leave the tumult unleashed on our world unscathed. Indeed, Diehl speaks of “residue” when describing the generation of the work being portrayed here, “Tripoli.” Says Diehl,

“In the summer of 2007 I went back to Lebanon, ready to find the residues
of the war; I had heard that things were going well, that the
rebuilding was well under way and that most people had high hopes for
the new prosperous summer. But just as I arrived to Beirut, fighting in the northern city of Tripoli broke out. But it was different from previous times; for the first time random car bombings took place, a different sense of fear took over, leaving everyone in a cautious state of being. We all waited, like lambs born before their time, a nervous uncertainty was truly in the air.
Madrases were closed, but kids still played, giving friendly names to
the sounds of war: "Popcorn" for the light artillery, the familiar rapid
fire, "Kibbe", for the heavy tank artillery, heavy and rich, like the slow grinding of lamb's meat.”

Diehl filmed these streets of Tripoli, the chaos and anxiety around her, but transformed the factual characteristics of war with a surreal cinematic veil, portraying a strange presence not easy to define but palpable in the work. “Tripoli” reproduced for me the state of New York post 9/11. Adrenaline makes you experience things differently, every sense goes into high gear; time slows down so every gesture can be processed and in “Tripoli” this sense of heightened awareness is transmitted though color and its somewhat dissonant connection with the sound. Color in the work partakes of a painterly quality, stretching figuration into a form of abstraction as though slowing down time until it becomes sensuously palpable, even though it is destruction that we see. The sounds of the streets by contrast are sharp and clear; every car, every machine, every echo, every prayer, children’s laughter, stay and linger, becoming a single track that plays over and over again. It is a work hard for the viewer to leave.