Gaston Zvi Ickowicz (Israel), Nadav Weissman (Israel),
Melanie Manchot (Germany-UK), 3P= 3Players (China), Laurent Mareschal (France), Tal Shoshan (Israel)
Curator: Nira Itzhaki
The exhibition raises aspects of neighborliness – a physical-geographical adjacency, predominantly determined in an arbitrary manner – examining the relations it dictates and the mutual influences it generates. The concept of “neighbors” is being probed from a perspective that includes an immediate proximity of person to person, a wider surrounding of residential neighborhood, and relations between vicinal populations in the political state. Neighborly relations also develop between the works in the exhibition itself.
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, photographs from the series “Load“, 2006, Lambda print, 95X120 cm.
Ickowicz photographed passersby in a site that appears to be a no man’s land in the city of Ashdod, engaging with this territory as a way of reflecting on the mundane, Sisyphean lives of the hardworking people he photographed. The body language of the photographed subjects itself comments upon these themes; they appear withdrawn, their gazes are cast down upon the ground and their shadows makes them appear smaller than they are. The pile of stones in the background of these images contributes to the sense of an indeterminate space; they appear as signs of urban construction, while simultaneously bespeaking a state of demolition and destruction. Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, born 1974 in Argentina, lives and works in Tel Aviv, winner of the Gerard Levi Prize from Israel Museum in Jerusalem for a young artist for the year 2008 and the 2008 scholarship from America-Israel Foundation.
Nadav Weissman, Black Lawn, 2005, installation, mixed media.
A miniature neighborhood of evacuated buildings, Nadav Weissman’s installation constitutes an arena for a penetrating and sober observation, in which the lacking spaces create relations of bitter-sweet absence, ironic and sore. Nadav Wiessman, born 1969, lives and works in Tel Aviv, winner of the 2005 prize for creation incentive from the Ministry of Science, Culture & Sport.
Melanie Manchot, pairs of photographs from the series “Neighbors“, 2008, every pair consists of a color print, 93X120 cm near a B&W postcard, 15X20 cm.
The set of postcards depict a group portrait of a set of people lined up in front of their Berlin houses where they lived and worked at the beginning of the 20th century. They became a set of instructions to return to the exact place to engage the current residents of the buildings to become part of the work exactly one hundred years later. In these images each person stands as an individual within the group, and yet one can read into these communities of fate and fortune, where each will be connected to both the history and the presence of the building, the street, the area in their own way. The work is presented as a diptych of old and new: the original postcards re-photographed and shown in their original size next to the new images. Melanie Manchot, born 1966 in Germany, lives and works in London for more than 10 years. In her first solo show in Israel in 2007, Manchot exhibited at Chelouche Gallery the video work “Shave”, that was also shown at the Vencie Biennale 2007. In these days Manchot participates at the Art Biennale in Salonica, Greece.
3P=3Players, Li Hong, Wang Mei, Xie Rong, Relativity no.1, 2008, DVD, 15 min.
This is the first show in Israel for the group of Chinese artists 3P=3Players. In the video work two people are looking at each other in the eyes, an action that we, in the computerized era, are less and less required of, and some even seem to dread. The people in the work volunteered for the project and are of various ages, nationalities and occupations. They have different relationships between them, such as friends, lovers, strangers, married couples, former class-mates, doctor and patient, teacher and student or employer and employee. They stand at a 20 cm distance from each other for three minutes, and communicate only through eye contact, speechless. 3P=3Players is a group that was established in 2007 by three Chinese women artists: Li Hong, a film director, Wang Mei, a contemporary dancing choreographer, and Xie Rong, a fashion designer. This is their first mutual work and it was presented at the Triennale for Contemporary Art in Nanjing, China in September 2008 and in the National Museum of Taiwan.
Laurent Mareschal, White Line, 2007-2008, HDV, 16/9, 7 min., stereo sound.
Video of a performance by the artist realised on 23rd June 2007, in which Mareschal outlines the lane of the separation wall with white lime in the Palestinian village of Wallajeh located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The act of delineation is an artistic gesture of Landscape Artists and Action Art on the one hand, but could be an actual notation for the wall constructors on the other hand. The lime which is used for construction, as well as for determining playgrounds’ limits, is a material that dries everything that comes in touch with it. Laurent Marecshal, born 1975 in France, lives and works in Paris.
Tal Shoshan, works from the series “Empty Spaces“, 2005, incision of road maps, mixed media, 160X190 cm.
Tal Shoshan cuts out the places in road maps from around the world, leaving only the roads that connect neighbor countries and cities. The areas around the roads are now empty spaces in which the representation of the land is void, a mapped area that transforms into a “different” place. The adjacent is now foreign and unfamiliar, allegedly it can be reached through reading the map, it’s possible to recognize shapes of cities, but the words are missing, the directing map is fragile and rickety, it represents a geographic space but seems like a living body, exposed, as a collection of blood veins. Tal Shoshan, born 1969, lives and works in Tel Aviv.
