(2025)
The work “Room on the Roof” is a site-specific installation created in the apartment of Toni Chen, located in Petah Tikva, Israel. Toni, who was 92 years old at the time of the work’s creation, immigrated to Israel from Benghazi, Libya, in 1949. In 1973, she received a gift from her son, Shimon (Simo) Chen—touristic prints he purchased in Kenya, created by the artist Heidi Lange.
Toni lives alone in an apartment that once served as a family home. The building was constructed by her brother, Ezra Berda, a building contractor, and was designed specifically for the needs of the family. The room on the roof, located at the end of a spiral staircase near the kitchen entrance, was previously used as her eldest daughter’s bedroom and later as a laundry drying room. Today, the room is no longer in use, yet its window, facing the rooftop, continues to let in natural light, shaping the atmosphere of the entire apartment.
The installation constructed in the room blocks access to the rooftop, but instead creates a new perspective within the space itself. By covering the window with green plexiglass, the incoming light is filtered and scattered in various shapes, resembling a kaleidoscope or an inverted mosque minaret—where light is not projected outward, but rather spills inward, coloring the depth of the floor between levels. As this filtered light meets the natural daylight streaming through the shutters of the modernist housing apartment, it gradually loses its intensity and effect.
The formal language of the work is drawn from the paintings of Heidi Lange, which hang in Toni Chen’s home.