Yad
The title of this series is 'YAD', which has a double meaning in Hebrew, 'yad' means 'hand' but also 'memorial'. The series was photographed in Peter Eizenman's holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin.
Gershuni approached couples visiting the memorial and asked to photograph them. Gershuni landed his camera always to the woman and asked her to take a photograph of himself with her partner (boyfriend or husband). Just before the woman snapped the photograph, Gershuni took the other man's hand, thus the photograph was taken while they were holding hands.
With Philistines
With Philistines | Avi Katz
Text for the exhibition “With Philistines”, Jule M. Gallery, Tel-Aviv, 2014
With Philistines (and in the exhibition: Samson [Self-portrait as], and also Self-portrait as a Happy Infiltrator): a declaration of ultimate otherness which is razor sharp and possesses the daring of a liminal painter, but is also crippled and even wide open to interpretation and castrated: the present absence of the beginning of the verse “Let me die”, as well as the echoes of these difficult times (many of the artworks in the exhibition were painted in the anguish of Operation Protective Edge) as well as an alternative reading that invokes the use of “philistine” as a moniker for those who show a crude contempt for intellectual and artistic values. Indeed, Yehezkelli's paintings offer a reversal of hierarchies that presume to distinguish between the proper manners of representation and the demonstrably outsider “bad painting”, which may affiliate him with that “omnivorousness” (to use the term coined by the sociologist Richard Peterson) – the highbrow crowd whose taste tends towards “everything…”
In his new paintings, Shai Yehezkelli continues to consistently develop a visual language of signs, which is multilayered, borrowed, and appropriated (from the The Birds' Head Haggadah to comic books and emoticons, from Stars of David to a cowboy with a cigarette) but also personal, veiled, and enigmatic. The viewer is invited on a journey of revelations that will somehow transform paint stains to shapes (the stain, claims Lacan, marks that which returns to the viewer from the painting, the presence of an object that cannot be seen). The act of painting celebrates a lively freedom of color and shape to the point of “excess” at times, but also presents its faltering and depletion.
In Yehezkelli's “presentation of 'self'” the painting becomes a chaotic container of sorts, into which conscious and subconscious forces are siphoned, in combinations riddled with irony and pathos (as a desperate attempt to produce emotion…). Yehezkelli's characteristic self portraits also have a deceptive nature, and rather than fixating self identity they are an expression of the dissolution of the identification of the “self”. The artist is an “entrepreneur of the self” (in the worlds of Svetlana Alpers). The multitude of self portraits (in the form of “self portrait as…”) expresses the game of changing masks, what marks the presence of the “act”, an “art occurrence” supposedly expropriated from the artist, an act that engenders a split of sorts between the portrait and the self that this portrait was supposed to transmit, and in fact embodies the dimension of failure to transmit the self that perhaps becomes “everyman” and at times “every Jew”…
This time, more than in the last exhibition, this carnivalesque art fair transgresses the boundaries of self that wallows in the pleasures of its despondency. From the introvert self to the world, to zeitgeist painting.
The works' titles do not “speak for themselves” but are a part of integrated art talk. Thus for instance, in the Monument for the Women of Shuja'iyya – a proposal for a monument of sorts, a woman lioness, an upside down IDF helmet that sprouts slivers of light, a noseless smiley, and another smiley that pops up in the layers of paint, winged like an angel of compassion from the top right, palm trees, Gaza-esque Guernicas (the junkyard of the global and Israeli history of art is not unknown to Yehezkelli). And next to it – The Picking of the Flowers – centralization in the hybrid figure and amorphous expansion into heaped chaos of signifiers that have multiple signifies: a bowed palm tree, a map that may also be a prayer shawl (Talit), a construction of an oriental landscape compressed in the left, a comb, an F bottle, and from the fauvist ground of amassed emoticons screams the death toll.
The two paintings of oriental sun, one happy and the other sad, imbue the exhibition space with a sort of atmospheric incense, suns which are eclipses, suns which are eyes, a watercolor pupil as a smiling face that will dissolve into an abstract stain in “sad sun”, where we find a happy palm tree … Onkelos from a bird's eye view that also resembles a palette, more than they exude life, these are disconcerting suns; the optimistic Platonist similitude between the sun and the eye, the metaphorical gaze at the sun as what leads to the purpose of the truth, a sublime step in the philosophical education ladder, is replaced by Georges Bataille who preaches to dare look at the anti-ideal, the dirty, with the blinding black sun, and like in the painting, the suns are also the eyeballs and the liquid is the tearing, the oozing, or the bleeding (this reoccurs in the painting Sunshine and Moisture and Self Portrait with Pogrom).
Pshat & Drash, drowners, a ship of fools, and a sail, a smiley wearing “a painter's hat”, a complicated hand, a floating piece of feces, a bird. An invitation to enter the “Pardes”.
(English translation: Maya Shimony)
We are a Bound Family
“Tal Amitai: We are a Bound Family” | Tali Tamir
Between the “holly family” and the “bound family” separates, in the work of Tal Amitai, a safety belt and a slogan of the Ministry of Transportation.
Amitai attacks the question of the family – one of the central concepts in the Jewish culture and Israeli society, a concept that grows every year during the holidays and that is still a taboo – few, certainly in the field of plastic arts, have touched it on such a direct level.
Amitai moves around the “soft belly” of the family – the dinner table. She paints her father dipping in a soup bowl, floating between parsley crumbs. At his side her mother, immersed at the bottom of the bowl, under a pile of spaghetti in tomato sauce.
The mother and father are painted in a sleeping position, they might be floating or they might be dead.
Helpless they are positioned between the knife, spoon and fork appropriately set on the checkered tablecloth (the father) or on a floral oilcloth (the mother).The rules of the set table, the table manners and food, contain within them the entire family metaphor: not only the control means of the parents over the children through food and feeding, but also the predator-devoured relationships and the potential of destruction and oppression lurking, in every family, somewhere under the folds of the tablecloth and among the hidden layers of the subconscious. Cannibalism of inter-generation and inter-familial battle of power.
In a series of sculpted works done in the late 80’s and named “The family”, Daniel Zak portrayed the arbitrariness of the familial connection when he drew a thin metal line between a rancid drop of semen, undefined, and the image of a human fetus.
Amitai is much more blunt than he was: when she continues to walk on the thin line between the micro and the intended, she scatters kernels of rice (she actually paints the scattering of the kernels) on a Hebron marble plaque, found in almost every Israeli kitchen typical of the middle class, and from the kernel scattering the writing becomes clear: “We turned out fucked”.
The familial relationship mediated through the simple imagery of common food (which family does not eat rice and meatballs?) is revealed in its other facet and exposed as a complex and vulnerable system, seeping way beyond the daily chore of cooking.
Motifs of cannibalism, between parents and children, are known in the mythological dimension and we could mention the fear striking painting of Goya describing the god Saturn eating his sons. Amitai, in a Freudian-macabre spirit, more than a mythological one, turns the motif upside down and expresses death wishes and aggressive impulses directed at the parents. Amitai does not build a scenario of fear and terror but rather, confronts the myth of familial connection with games of chance and gambling like the Lottery and jackstraws: scattering the jackstraws is like scattering the human semen – random, arbitrary, uncontrolled – you need Lotto in life in order to win the big prize and in order to be born in the right family. “Luck is after you” – like in the slogan of the Lottery, quoted in one of the works.
Amitai gambles for luck out of the maze of the familial connection. She allows herself to untie the “safety belt” of the family and cast her own private lucky cards.
To Prague with Love
Ira Eduardovna | To Prague with Love
Solo exhibition at Cuchifritos gallery, NYC
curator: Sanna Almajedi
Description:
This piece was made during my two months residency at FUTURA in Prague, Czech Republic in 2013.
I grew up in Uzbekistan in the 80ies when it was still part of the falling Soviet Union. In 1987 my older sister, Victoria, participated in a program of correspondence between Soviet children and children from the “non-hostile” western countries (as Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries that were under Soviet occupation). She corresponded with a girl from Prague for about one year. The video examines the relationship between the children who unwillingly were representing their countries.
When I was in Prague I posted an announcement in the local newspaper, in search for the woman who was corresponding with my sister. Few people who had similar experiences of correspondence replied, but none of them was the one who wrote to Victoria. I interviewed four women about their experience of correspondence.
Each woman tells her personal story, adding a scripted part about being the one who corresponded with Victoria.
The video presents a desperate search for a physical confirmation of a personal fleeting memory within the context of global history. It starts as a documentary then it abruptly turns into a staged reality TV
This Way Or Another
The Installation consists of furniture, light bulbs, rope, drawings.
Two Figures In A Field
January 10 – February 22, 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, January 10, 6–8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, February 8, 2:30pm
https://www.lesleyheller.com/exhibitions/20200110-tom-pnini-two-figures-in-a-field
Lesley Heller is pleased to present Two Figures in a Field, an experiential installation by the New York based, Israeli-born artist Tom Pnini. In this exhibition, Pnini—known predominantly for his films—has constructed an interactive installation comprised of two main elements The Set and The Vinyl Album, where the audience becomes an active participant.
The installation presents like a theatre stage, one that comes to life only when the viewer interacts with it. Pnini’s use of theatrical motifs enables him to act as puppeteer placing gallery visitors where they can be mesmerized by the illusion created by the work, while still being fully aware of its deception.
Entering the space, viewers engage with the set, comprised of 12 rows of shoulder-height partitions forming a series of maze-like corridors in the gallery. Advancing through the space, visitors begin to experience the installation. The partitions form a vast seascape rendered in blues and cutout wave shapes. The wave side of the installation is a tribute to sea travel—and to the myriad of reasons travelers have made journeys for millennia. It is a voyage as a tale; one of fame, romance, escape, and the unknown promises of a new land.
The vinyl album is a limited edition pressing conceived of, and produced by Pnini, featuring musician Hannah Lee Thompson performing songs dating from the 1800s which relate to the themes of water and fire. A record player is waiting in the space for visitors to play the two songs—Haul Away Joe, a sea shanty which tells the story of life-long adventure of a sea traveler, and The Two Orphans Waltz which references the Brooklyn Theatre fire on December 5, 1876 where 300 people were trampled to death trying to escape a fire that started during a performance. Both songs will also be performed live by Hannah Lee Thompson several times during the show.
Miniature theaters—creating a play within a play—are seen throughout the installation. An antique wooden radio holds within it a miniature set of the Brooklyn Theatre at the moment the tragic fire broke out. An old liquor cabinet installed in the gallery has also been transformed into an empty theatre showing only the set where a story of sea travel will unfold.
When visitors exit the space, the reverse side of the wave partitions form a landscape of fire. Rendered in rich yellows and oranges, the back of each wave cutout becomes a flame.
As visitors complete the journey from one side of the gallery to the other, they act as the absent protagonists of the two stories of the installation. With this double-feature of installation and performance—fire and water, two stories, two songs—activated by music and the participants, Two Figures in a Field becomes a story of the forgotten, met at the moment when the drama has ended and the curtain is just about to drop.
**
Tom Pnini (b. 1981, Israel) creates time-based works and large-scale installations. He has exhibited in museums and galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Milan, Toronto, Moscow, and Israel, including a 2012 solo exhibition at the esteemed Chelouch Gallery in Tel-Aviv. He holds a BED from Hamidrasha College (2008) and an MFA from Parsons School of Design at the New School (2010). He has received a CCA Video Art Fund (2012), a Dean’s Graduate Scholarship from Parsons (2009-10), and an Outstanding Artistic Excellence Award from Beit Berl College (2008). He lives and works in New York City.
UNTITLED, Miami beach 2018
Chelouche Gallery is pleased to present new works for Untitled Miami 2018, by artist Melanie Daniel. With crowded narrative paintings in psychedelic teals and pinks, the artist introduces us to a desolate sun-drenched paradise in the near future, where earnest characters try to reconnect with nature and rebuild their post-cataclysm world. Daniel celebrates their attempted resistance with lucid figuration, manically vibrating pattern, and giddy coloration with acidic overtones, belying the pathos underneath.
Whether reviving plant species, bottling them in terrariums, or engaging with wildlife, the youths populating Daniel’s paintings show the pervading duality of a disillusioned post-11/9 generation, rife with both utopian and dystopian narratives. In Daniel’s imagination, we are never sure of what exactly is accomplished through these efforts, but her insistent style lends itself to their idealism.
Ups and Downs Landscapes
Nadav Weisman
Ups and Downs Landscape at KaBe Contemporary gallery
A Labyrinth into Personal Archaeology
A walk through the studio of Weisman in Tel Aviv in early September 2012, and its transition ‘overseas’ into the gallery space in Miami, ignites several directions of thought and reflection on the artist’s current work.
Weisman’s interdisciplinary installation invites the viewer into a space that holds two realms of experience at once: a labyrinth and an archaeological site. We as spectators, or visitors to this space eloquently must move around the space, as we undergo a process of excavation, deciphering the iconic symbols around us: a house, a head, a body, a ladder, numbers. Weisman entails in his work a process of digging and exposure, of a personal and cultural terrain, reminiscent of desert landscapes where removal and filling take place.
Inside this space, we are taken into a labyrinth which we must decipher, as it is inside labyrinths where a clear route that takes the visitor into the center where the ‘truth’ is said to be found. These labyrinths appear at times in dreams and may represent notions of misgivings or uncertainties. Usually it is difficult to find the access point into the labyrinth and difficult to escape it, legends say it is only the sage one that can find his/her way. The labyrinth may incite confusion or a sense of disorientation – represented in Weisman’s center piece and ladders around the gallery – one can approach but cannot walk inside or through them, as they are minutely small, narrow or misgiving to a promenade within them.
Weisman is closely connected to his home-town Haifa, a port-city, industrial in character where the working class was a prominent layer of the population, where the ocean is always at the view of the spectator, yet at its skyline is filled with a view of large ships, transportation hauls, and a growing number of business office buildings. Reminiscent of the urban and natural landscapes of his hometown, Weisman in his special experiences juxtaposes painting, sculpture and installation, embedded as one body of work, interconnected to each other. This core element of his oeuvre embodies layers of reflection and perspective characteristic of the Weisman signature language that he has developed over the past decade.
Colin Renfrew, the prominent British archaeologist, claims that the archaeologist, much like a visitor at a gallery of contemporary art, attempts to make sense of and to figure out the material world in front of them, be it an art installation, or the objects, the artifacts and buildings unearthed from an archaeological excavation. But he also alludes to another kind of relationship: the archaeological process, according to the author, can be seen as art production, through the features created on the ground by expositing old structures and creating news ones, but also through material practices, such as photographing archaeological features, objects, and landscapes and producing texts about them.
All in caves, enclosed, usually lacking openings for escape, it is only through harsh digging that we as spectator can enter Weisman’s world and find a head, a house, numbers. In the practice of preservation and conservation of archaeology each artifact or specimen is numbered with a small ticket, usually hidden from the viewer’s eye. Here it seems as the numbers the artist has accumulated, perhaps each symbolizing an archival/archaeological specimen of his own, is buried deep inside the earth provoking also thoughts on death and mass burials, yet at the same time igniting a sense of terranial life.
Danna Heller
—
Danna Heller is an independent art curator based in Tel Aviv.
Colin Renfrew was Master of Jesus College Cambridge, and later as director of the MacDonald Institute of Archaeological Research.
Muddy Blues : Nadav Weisman's Ups and Downs Landscape
Avshalom Suliman
Plywood is, by American standards, a legitimate, if somewhat precarious, construction / building material. It is also the chief component in Nadav Weisman's solo exhibition, his first in the US. In the hands of a skilled craftsman a truckload of plywood panels may turn into a house. Once occupied, a house begins to accumulate the presence of its human tenants until it acquires that elusive quality that turns it into a home. In the context of Weissman's art the occupation of the houses and tenement buildings that dot his paintings or make up his sculptural installations is never quite possible. Although his oeuvre may very well be described as an ongoing building project, the architectural structures he creates remain desperately vacant. This pathological vacancy is one of the elements that infuse Ups and Downs Landscape with a subtle sense of melancholy. All of the artist's imagery – the makeshift architectural gestures, horses' and human heads, the lakes and ponds and swampland, the ladders, trees and roots – seem 'hollowed out' like dissected memories inside the cavities of the mind.
There is a stark contrast between the richness of Weisman's arabesque-like imagery and the matter-of-factness with which he renders it. His is a rough painting, lean and bonny, so to speak. His work is rapid and straight forward, as if carried out by someone facing a torrent of images he must capture with great urgency and frugality, leaving out all that is unnecessary for his 'geographical' report. It is tempting to tag these works as “necessary cartography”, where the images convey the very process of recording only the fundamental information onto the plywood surface.
Rather than a thorough rendition of a visible landscape, what we get here is an express transmission of an internal one, a swamp-like world with cavities and caves in which images of considerable suggestive power lie. The atmosphere reminds us of the primary Freudian assertion whereby what lies beneath the surface is always as important, if not more important, than what is visible. A horse's head is not merely 'lacking a body' but rather is an image of amputation, charged with symbolic meaning which renders it both highly personal and universal.
The swampland, the archaic symbol of Time immemorial, is presumably a magnet for two types of personas, initially at odds with one another. For the restless, free-spirited Pioneer, forever drawn to the mire by the sheer challenge it poses, there are but two options: to conquer that untamable 'virginal' wilderness or to die by its dark spells, breathless in the rotten-egg stench of its ancient bosom. For the pensive, melancholic poet, the swampland is the sad goldmine of his own melancholy. And it is never 'a virgin': as Weisman's works show, the swamp, and at the same token any landscape is always laden with images, dreams and memories. So the artist, just like the territorial Colonialist, might find himself knee-deep in the mud, but for entirely different reasons. Where the first seeks to do away with the marshes by drying them out, the latter digs-in laboriously as the swamp calls him to uncover what is buried beneath its slimy surface. To put it plainly, the artist needs the swamp, metaphorical or real, because 'unearthing' it is where his work to grow from. He may dig-in, but he's not in the business of draining.
Weisman's other important medium in this exhibition is mud or rather translucent mud, at once concealing and revealing. The tension between concealment and revelation is what renders the Erotic visible. In that sense the artist's landscapes are utterly auto-erotic, and bear a sense of irony that is a terribly private one. One may even call it a tragic irony: the irony of a Dreaming Head which appears. In its tautological cyclicality, which portrays the dreamer and the dream as one and the same, Weissman's world is rather like a child's dreamland, enclosed and self-sufficient. The artist is, then, both the child and the adult here, whose mastery is precisely his ability to conjure the private symbol out of his own psyche and render it public. In this sense, we may approach Weisman's body of work as we would a coming-of-age narrative, a bildungsroman in which the author/artist renders his internal landscape visible in order to make sense of the troublesome outside world.
The three dimensional works in the exhibition are rather different than what the artist had produced in the last decade or so. In his previous sculptural installations Weisman had carved a private universe for himself, inhabited by bulky sculptures of child-like characters. His room-size works portrayed a world that pivots around the child's onanistic play. With their un-proportionally large heads, his 'children' were the quintessence of puberty, stuck halfway between childhood and maturity. In other words – they were hybrids, forever engaged in a game of jackstraw or riding broomstick horses. They were the actors in the his mini-dramas, which he fashioned out with great detail, perhaps as a means of an obsessive self-examination.
The fragile reliefs in Ups and Downs Landscape suggest the maturity of someone who looks at things from a distance, a temporal rather than a physical distance, as if remembering things past. If examined in an autobiographical context, these architectural sculptures may provide valuable reading of weissman's world. In most cases these reliefs either remain tact to the wall, or hover a few inches above the ground. In some cases they protrude into the three dimensional air, like thin trajectories, the specters of some anonymous urban landscape, suspended in mid air. This delicate physicality of suspension between the discernible image and the abstract gesture, is equivalent to the metaphorical quality of his early work, that sense of being in-between ages. Here the adolescent-baby, stuck between worlds, is replaced by images of houses that are suspended halfway between ceiling and floor, as their plywood bodies attempt to defy gravity.
Perhaps this makeshift architecture is reminiscent of the city of Haifa, Weismman's native town in the Northern part of Israel. It's a city of paradoxical nature, utterly modern- and laden with history, a symbol for Jewish-Arab co-existence, yet constantly watchful for the possible eruption of the age-old nation, ethnic and religious tensions. Built on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, Haifa's morphology is a direct result of the mountainous geography of its surroundings. Its downward movement towards the Mediterranean Sea and the port area results in its division into an upper town and a lower city.
This up-and-down geography may be discerned in Weisman's basic rendering of his landscapes, and, more importantly, in the fundamental division between what is above the surface and what is buried sub-strata. One is tempted to identify his preoccupation with the Freudian model of the soul with the very surroundings of his upbringing. This interpretation should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, but the image of a city suspended in mid-air is undeniably a fundamental one in the show. The entire 'landscape' of the exhibition seems to stretch between the horizontal and the vertical, above and beneath a horizon line that separates the upper and the lower worlds, and between the opposing forces, ascending and descending Weisman's bridges, catwalks and ladders.
I'd like to stretch this line of thought a bit further, hopefully without jeopardizing its mysterious opaqueness. As we return to the lonely houses that would never be homes, which Weisman carefully places above the ground, it may become clear that what is buried beneath them may very well be the reasons these houses can never become homes. Like the modern house build on the ancient cemetery in countless horror flicks known to every American, Nadav Weisman's houses are forever haunted by the very images and objects he digs up from underneath them.
—
Avshalom Suliman is an artist and freelance writer based in Tel-Aviv, Israel
The Glory and the Misery of our Existence (sorrow of others)
The Great Story of My Nation
The Installation consists of chair, valise, light bulbs, drawings, room size
Shown at:
The great story of my nation, Reinking project, Hamburg, Germany
Active constellation – works from Reinking collection, House of Art, Brno, Czech Republic.
The Ground on Which I Stand (Part II)
The Ground on Which I Stand (Part II)
Nir Alon | Gazmend Ejupi
Curator: Michele Robecchi
'The Ground on Which I Stand' first opened at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv last spring. Following the date in Prishtina, it will travel to Hamburg and London.
The Ground on Which I Stand (Part III)
Nir Alon and Gazmend Ejupi | The Ground on Which I Stand
the Agency Gallery, London
Curator: Michele Robecchi
‘The Ground on Which Stand’ is based on a speech given by the great, late American playwright August Wilson (1945-‐2005) on the occasion of the Theatre Communications National Conference in New York in 1996. A key art of Wilson’s statement was about the difficulties he was having in separating his concerns with theatre from his concerns of his life as an African-‐American. 'It is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless … art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. The ideas I discovered and embraced in my youth when my idealism was full blown I have not abandoned in middle age when idealism is something less the blooming, but wisdom is starting to bud. The ideas of self‐determination that governed my life in the ’60s I find just as valid and self‐urging in 1996.’
Taking the cue from Wilson’s plea, the exhibition aims to investigate the impossibility of separating art from life and how they contribute to shaping our vision of society. Nir Alon (b. 1964) and Gazmend Ejupi (b. 1973) both share an interest in theatrical forms of representation as well as a constant struggle to define their cultural and geographical identity. The resulting sense of displacement is reflected in their different practices and the dialogue they entertain.
This exhibition, now in its third incarnation, marks the first collaboration between the two artists after years of acquaintance. The choice of investigating their own individuality, as well as issues of nostalgia, belonging, absence, integration and diversity, through a joint statement reveals an exploration of everyday reality counterbalanced by complementary narrative models.
The public display of their perception of the changes that have characterized their lives is an invitation to enter a moment of collective history and experience a personal one, and to embark on a journey to discover the ground on which you stand.
‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ first opened at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv in spring 2011 and at Tetris in Prishtina in autumn. Following the date in London, it will travel to Hamburg for its conclusive leg, where a catalogue documenting all four exhibitions will be launched.
The Ground On Which I Stand (part IV)
The Ground On Which I Stand
An exhibition in four parts
Tel Aviv, Pristina, London, Hamburg
The Ground on Which I Stand is an exhibition investigating the impossibility of separating art and life and how the former one can help shaping our vision of society.
Artists
Nir Alon (b. 1964) is an Israeli-born, German sculptor and installation artist. Alon studied from 1988 until 1992 at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 1996 he received the prize for young artists from the Israeli Ministry for Education and Culture. In 2001 he received a working scholarship as a guest artist to Hamburg and since then he has lived and worked in the city.
Nir Alon preferably develops his sculptures from discarded everyday life items such as furniture, suitcases, lamps, light bulbs and cords. His installations are assembled on and reference the exhibition sites in order to obtain an effect of urgency with the most affordable means. His works are in many public and private collections in Germany, Israel, Italy and the United States.
Detailed exhibitions list available on request.
Gazmend Ejupi (b. 1973) is a Kosovo-born artist based in London. Ejupi graduated from the College of Arts and Design in London and obtained an Master of Arts at the Kingston University.
His work focuses on conflicted identities and the phenomenon of immigration that is dominating our times. Through a varied range of media, that includes painting, sculpture and film, he investigates sentiments of nostalgia and marginalization as well as the contradictions of contemporary culture deploying simple yet compelling narratives and astute social observations.
His work has been exhibited in many international exhibitions, including the 1st Celeste Prize in London and the 4th Tirana Biennale in 2009. Detailed exhibitions list available on request.
Curator
Michele Robecchi is an art critic and curator based in London, where he is a Commissioning Editor at Phaidon Press and a Visiting Professor at Christie's Education. He is the author of a monograph on the work of Sarah Lucas (Electa, 2006) and, together with Francesca Bonazzoli, of From Mona Lisa to Marge: How the World's Greatest Artworks entered Popular Culture (Prestel, 2014).
He has curated or co-curated various exhibitions, including 'TIP: Trends, Ideas, Projects' (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2004), 'Beauty So Difficult' (Fondazione Stelline, Milan, 2005), 'Calling All the Stations' (National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina, 2010), 'Pretenzione Intenzione' (Fabbrica Rosa di Szeemann, Maggia, Switzerland, 2015), 'Brian Eno: The Ship' (La Commun, Geneva, 2016), and two editions of the Tirana Biennale (2001, 2003).
Special thanks to
Ishai Adar, Shlomo Almagor and Israel Reisen Travelling Agency, Malca (Regina) and Itzhak (Tomy) Alon, Mika Alon, Shelly Alon, Adi Artsi, Jesta Brouns and Ina Königsberg – Design Factory International Hamburg, Ofra Cain, Ishai Adar, Bloody Foreigners, Michal and Miron Fried, Fabienne Gassmann, Bea Herhold de Sousa, Elena Kane, Ralf Krüger, Nira Itzhaki, Cosimo Martin, Alban Nuhiu, Yifat and Ilan Solomon, Aferdita Statovci, Nora Weller, August Wilson, Eial Yehuda
The Library Room
Ira Eduardovna | The Library Room
Solo exhibition at Braverman gallery
text – Ira Eduardovna:
The video shows members of my family packing a suitcase in a sort of assembly line structure: my father is naming the object in Russian, my mother is taking the object and placing it on a table, my older sister is wrapping it and I place it in the suitcase. Every time the father names the object, a synthetic voice translates the name of the object to Hebrew. The situation happens in a domestic library room.
The narrative was filmed 5 times: one high angle shot of the table with the suitcase and the hands of the family members and four frontal medium shots of each family member. The five angles composited together create a layout of a room, as if it’s an open box/cube. The video is projected on an architectural structure of the room layout made of plywood, with a potential to open and close
The Lover’s House
The Lover's House
Curator: Tali Tamir
The installation consists of the series of the paintings “Ambition”, “The Lover’s House” and some objects in Variable size.
The Gun that Shot Ambition: On Nadav Weissman’s Paintings
Tali Tamir
“This man who had returned home,” wrote Robert Musil on the man-without-qualities, “could not remember any time in his life that had not been animated by his determination to become a man of importance; it was as though Ulrich had been born with this wish. It is true that such an urge may be a sign of vanity and stupidity; it is no less true, however, that it is a very fine and proper desire, without which there would probably not be many men of importance.”
The figure recurring in Nadav Weissman’s paintings is also, in a way, a hero-without-qualities, who invests his entire self in an attempt to move one rung up the ladder and reach greatness. The head of this male figure is swollen from all that ambition to climb; his relatively small body moves forward and up. The figure’s facial features, the thinning and somewhat receding hairline, the loose belly and strained movements reveal a pale young man in the prime of his life, who puffs out his cheeks and blows pink gum-bubbles while paving his way. He is standing on the head of another figure, exactly like him, and on his own shoulders climbs yet another lookalike. The labor of climbing becomes a horse ride of sorts where the hair of each figure on the ladder functions as reins held by the figure thereabove; this human pyramid is equal in height to a long-legged horse marked number 28. “Going over from the cavalry to civil engineering Ulrich merely changed horses,” Musil described the efforts of his protagonist to “hunt” prominence for himself – “The new horse had limbs of steel and ran ten times as fast. […] even today, if they [people] want to make themselves out to be something special they mount, not a skyscraper, but the high horse…”
Weissman’s duplicated protagonist is not only “mounted on the horse” taking part in the race, but he also holds in his hand a rifle or a revolver, which he always points straight ahead toward an unidentified target. Naked women too participate in this odd procession, which constantly progresses onward, their breasts are pointy, their legs – ultra-thin, and they are armed with a purse slung over their shoulder. Each sex and its respective weaponry, these figures march within a circus-like arena, either pink or turquoise, which is also populated by dogs, balls and acrobats. However, the more you look at them, the more these paintings transform from a colorful-caricature happening into a melancholic allegory about the human condition: at some indefinite moment in time, it seems that ambition itself had been shot, the puffed cheeks had been deflated, the gum-bubble had burst (like the soap bubbles in Vanitas paintings), and the victim remained shot and abandoned.
Nadav Weissman offers us painting with narrative-allegorical foundations, verging on the grotesque rather than the comical. Bearing the literary title The Lover’s Home, the second series of paintings too, relies on the same foundations which, this time, strive to make an allegory about love’s destiny through the space in which it was woven. Unlike the ambition procession that takes place against crowdedness and noise, the lover’s home is revealed to be empty of its inhabitants, and all that remains – in memory shreds, distorted perspective and orange silence – are the glowing crystal chandelier and some toys on the floor. It is the combination between a playful child-like world and an adult consciousness that recognizes the gap between love and its realization, that lends this domestic emptiness its allegorical and emotional power.
The Phantom Menace
Uri Gershuni | The Phantom Menace Solo exhibition, Hamidrasha Art Gallery, Beit Berl
The State of Things
This large installation shown at tinderbox extends over the entire gallery space and – like most installations by Nir Alon since the 90ies – consists of used, partly discarded, furniture as well as light bulbs.
At first sight this may appear trivial, but furniture carries personal and collective history and they are – as well –
a mirror of society.
Nir Alon negates totally the normal use of furniture and brings it into abeyance. By creating reckless balancing acts – which may seem just impossible to the beholder if he didn’t see it with his own eyes – the artist lets the furniture and the light become his own and our history with severe ease. Always on the verge of the big crash, he points out that everything can always be very different than a second before and that things can, sometimes, change faster as we would believe.
Information wise – drawing the maximum out of his installations is one of most important topics of the artist, while all the stories, feelings and drama of their former users are only mentally present.
Through the instability, some transience of life shown quite plainly but the existential declaration which made is no pure nihilism at all; in the end Alon’s installations are load-carrying forms. The threat of misbalancing is also a game, a play which may be quite regarded with humour. According to this one can associates and reflect toward huge spectrum and we can be sure that the artist is conscious about that: From Buster Keaton’s humour to Dadaism and Environment art, from action art of the 1960ies, Assemblage and object art to Fluxus and Arte Povera. Names like Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp or Jannis Kounellis and Joseph Beuys come to our mind. Beuys installation „Erdbeben im Palast“ (Earthquake in Palace) from 1981 as an example, shows everyday life objects and furniture that are arranged fragile and hang in the balance. In this example we can define a special situation right after the disaster that changed everything while Nir Alon leaves us completely insecure if something blatant happened or will happen.
Not only our knowledge around the history of art which can be consulted is important, but also the game and the play which the artist plays with our perception – a game with a vague result. Furniture and light bulbs specify a quasi-theatrical play – as Alon revives it after nobody wanted them anymore. For sure there are a lot of stories to tell about the artist himself – e.g. that he was born in 1964 in Jerusalem, Israel, that he was – let alone his forefathers – on the run, and that he has no studio because it would have no use for him. But the beholder doesn’t have to know the private background, even though it has hints in Alon’s works. And so, the stuff of everyday life – that normally stays put – turns to metaphors of travel, escape as well as the time between arrival and departure. But these installations are not there to raise our pity. They shall remind us on (our) weakness, reflecting on (human) weakness that can be seen as a quite interesting situation: losing and loss is also a sign of strength.
“The state of things“ – Nir Alon shows that through rediscovering what people do not want to have around them anymore. And even if it may look like an accident, a joke, an improvisation or non-art it hopefully leaves us with the impression of an elegy. Also due to the deep and dark bloodline that European history has left in everyone and everything, which plays its role here -it is definitely about feelings.
And knowledge.
Balance is also just a kind of tightrope act of emotions, and a lack of emotions hold desolation, which we want to avoid.
The 27th Bienale of Sao Paulo
