CURATOR, RESEARCHER
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
IRREGULAR OBJECT
PAVILION AT THE 14TH GWANGJU BIENNIAL
April-July 2023
G.MAP, Gwangju - South Korea
Irregular Objects is a group exhibition about the nature of objects in our world and our relationship with them. This collection of video and installation works explores objects of different sorts: unseen, virtual, politically charged, out-of-this-world objects and objects that act differently than expected.
LIGHT TO THE NATIONS
YAEL BARTANA
February - June 2023
Light to the Nations by artist and filmmaker Yael Bartana is a proposal aimed at saving humankind in the face of a global catastrophe that would extinguish any possibility of life on Earth. This proposal is influenced by post-apocalyptic science-fiction literature as well as a critique of today’s accelerated technological progress and a fear of the economic and political forces involved in it.
MONUMENT/ACTION EXHIBITION TRILOGY
2016-2018
Institute for Public Presence - Center for Digital Art, Holon
Monument/Action is a trilogy of exhibitions mounted between 2016 and 2018. The series examined strategies and forms of artistic action in the local public domain during the twentieth century, and proposed contexts and responses in contemporary art. The project developed as part of ongoing research by Udi Edelman and Yael Messer at the Institute for Public Presence, which was established at the Center for Digital Art in 2015.
WHAT ARE MONUMENTS MADE OF
2017
exhibition within the 11th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania
The point of departure for this exhibition is the inevitable presence of monuments already planted in the personal and the everyday, in the spatial experience, and in the field of vision imprinted by them. The monuments are always already there – timeworn, foreign, casting shadows, mute in the face of reality. In this respect, thinking today about the materiality of monuments demands first and foremost an investigation of ourselves as a social and political material, of the becoming-citizen in front and through them, and by means of the changes to their perception as sublime, permanent, and durable objects.
LAUNCH SITES LA : EZRA ORION REVISITED
2017
Platt and Borstein Galleries - AJU, Los Angeles, USA
WORKS, PROPOSALS, AND MODELS 1965-2001
Ezra Orion (1934-2015) was an Israeli sculptor, poet, and thinker. In his work, he sought to exceed the dimensions of institutions, gallery walls and urban space, and focus on sculpture that would envelop the spectators, contain them, and evoke a spiritual, existential experience. In the Negev desert, he began creating situations, moments, and environments designed to serve as “launch sites” for human consciousness, to explore the transcendent and the cosmic.
This exhibition presents Orion’s principal fields of action: from desert expanses, through movements and changes in the Earth’s surface, to outer space. All these are examined through original works alongside documents from Orion’s archive, which were presented for the first time in the Israeli Center for Digital Art (2016) within the framework of the Institute for Public Presence.
HISTORIES
October 5th 2013 – January 25th 2014
Center for Digital Art, Holon
At the core of Histories was the basic thesis suggesting that in recent years artists developed new interest in the formation of history and the question of truth of historical narratives. Histories considered the relation between truth and fiction, having recognized an area of action in contemporary art that uses history in a similar way to how a sculptor uses clay or stone. It does not use history merely as a trigger for the artwork but as the platform or substance that the artist cuts, fuses, distorts and shapes. It can also be argued that these types of actions aim to react to our present life and political situation, letting the audience question the borders of their knowledge.
WHERE TO?
2012
Center for Digital Art, Holon
Where to? was an attempt to reexamine ideological currents and modes of activity within the framework of the modern Jewish revolution in general, and the Zionist movement in particular, which emerged and then rejected, and to engage them in reference to contemporary Jewish existence and its problems. The point of departure for the project was the similarity between questions regarding Jewish existence that emerge in the contemporary context, and those that emerged in the context of the second half of the nineteenth century. In both periods we detect a sense of anxiety. In the past, this sense arose out of the failure of Jewish emancipation, the Pogroms, and social rejection, all of which led to mass migration, alongside an incredible ferment of creative ideas and experimental, creative answers to “The Jewish Question.” A similar anxiety is felt nowadays with respect to the deadlock reached by Zionism in general and Israeli nationalism in particular—including the way nationalist and racist trends occupy an increasingly central role in Israeli society, Israel’s isolation from the international community, and its maintaining a sense of permanent threat as the only means for guaranteeing national cohesion.
FLOWERS OF OUR LAND
2019
Institute for Public Presence - Center for Digital Art, Holon
Human contemplation of flora has always been twofold. On the one hand, there is a sense of wonder when faced with the natural world, and on the other – the innate drive to utilize nature, to consume and market it, to transfer its products from place to place and control its growth. This instrumental attitude towards nature is interwoven into the fabric of relations between humans and is also tied to various forms of community settlement.
The exhibition Flowers of Our Land offers a renewed look at flora generally, and at certain plants specifically (olive tree, spiderwort, cyclamen, willow, tumble thistle, and others). It examines the use of plants as a form of communication between groups, as well as a conduit to mediate and separate between groups and the individuals that comprise them – and finally, between these individuals and themselves.
HELA
FORMS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
May-June, 2014
Ha’yarkon 19 Gallery, Tel-Aviv
Thinking about human existence and the changes it is about to undergo in the following decades ignite the imagination, as well as horror. Whether it will take utopian or dystopian forms is yet to be witnessed and difficult to picture. On the horizon are questions that deal first and foremost with the relations of the physical and the technological, the distinctions between spiritual and material and the moral implications of contemporary technology. The Post-Human is the protagonist confronting these fundamental questions. Its character unfolds through two separate and different routes. One in the form of theoretical critique against the humanism that sees man in superior dominion over nature; the other stems out of scientific-technological notions of progress reaching as far as a total shedding of the corporeal. The works in the exhibition are suspended between these two approaches, creating various possibilities and continuities in regards to life, human and a-human existence.