Ben Orkin

Group Catalogue Site

Extra Safe

“Extra Safe is the space between two bodies where the one body does not pass on to the other body, where the one body protects themselves from another body. It is a barrier, a physical barrier, an emotional barrier, a barrier between the past and the present; it is a barrier between love and fear, the powerful and the vulnerable, the inside and the outside and the line between protection and hurt. It is a wall that’s built inside and imagined all around our bodies. It is built so tall, you can’t even see over to the other side.

Different things make the same thing happen and every time they happen, the same thing happens. The people with the power draw a line between two sides to protect all the powerful things they’ve built. It’s like what happened to the queens. When the queens got sick, no one helped them, and everyone said it was the punishment for being a queen. When the men got sick, they blamed it on the queens. The men didn’t like the queens because they thought that to be a queen was to threaten the family unit and to threaten the family unit was to threaten traditional values and to threaten traditional values was to threaten the church and to threaten the church was to threaten authority and to threaten authority was to threaten the government and to threaten the government was to threaten the men. So the queens thought and fought for protection and for their place inside the walls.

But the walls just got built higher and taller and bigger and stronger, breaking everything up into categories and separating people and spaces into parts of a whole fragmenting into little bits and pieces.

Then time passes and we forget it ever happened and the next generation happens and the next generation thinks they’re greater and smarter and safer than the generation who made them happen and the walls that were built higher and taller and bigger and stronger around the generation who made them happen. And maybe its each generation of queens who find that the only place they can be at home is when they’re outside the walls of the men, but it’s so vast out there that the only place the queens can go is inside themselves and they can build their own walls inside themselves just like the men built walls around them.

When what happened to the queens happens again to you, when the past meets you in the present, you realise how little you know about it and everything the queens actually did for you because it’s only when it happens to you that you have to acknowledge how you feared it or how you’ve been taught to fear it by the people with the power. You realise how the powerful managed to use their power to make everyone fear everyone like you by using everything that happened to everyone like you against you so they could protect everything they built.

Only one side builds the wall and the other just looks up at it. Only one side is being protected while the other side is being hurt. Only one side can really be Extra Safe.”

I’m currently working towards a solo exhibition which will take place towards the end of this year at WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery Cape Town. The exhibition will include the works I produced last year for my fourth and final year at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.