Gal Weinstein at Beyond Frontiers, the 8ª Mercosul Biennial – Essays in Geopoetics, Brazil
Curator: Aracy Amaral
Opening: 09.09.2011
10.09 – 15.11.2011
Gal Weinstein at the 8th Mercosul Biennial – Essays in Geopoetics, 2011, Installation view
Earth tremors, a turbulent typhoon, fire creeping though cracks in cliffs or quarries, clouds of dust, burning tyres… As the Italian critic Loredana Mascheroni said of Weinstein’s exhibition in Milan last December, his work borders on the limits between order and chaos, man and society. This artist from the youngest generation of Israeli artists addresses everyday environmental scenes from our turbulent planet, with telluric themes using industrial material such as wool, PVC or MDF, leaving their material nature on view to concentrate on “truth to material”, as the artist puts it, and rejection of painting. When producing the cracked land of an earthquake (Tremors, 2007), in a huge floor installation with a gigantic seismographic record of the degree of intensity transferred to the walls, the earth floor was sculpted by the artist himself – “I sculpted the earth”, he says, making use of industrial materials made from compressed sawdust. “The work created a disturbing contrast between what is seen and what is experienced.”
Weinstein obtained a panoramic view of the Entre-Ijuís region of Rio Grande do Sul from Google Earth, and transposed this image into a carpet made from industrialised materials for the central area of the ground floor of MARGS. This work is one sequence from a series previously produced by the artist in Israel, focusing on land divided by earthquakes or on aerial views of this country. In the case of the huge installation for the museum in Porto Alegre, the wall-to-wall carpet is the result of a “cold” projection, one might say, in that it did not require the presence or direct observation of the artist on the area it focuses on and enlarges, or any emotive involvement in the region on the part of its creator. What it actually offers us is the unfamiliarity of a virtual visual appropriation of the territory from thousands of kilometres away.
