Fall Exhibition 11.2021 – 2.2020
Alina Rom Cohen
Bat Candies | Installation
Danielle Feldhaker
And the dreams are rich with colors | Installation
Dan Birenboim
Artist Wall | Acrylic on paper
The sketch surrenders to a round, natural and practically whole movement that becomes a foundation, the place in which images are seared in – the eye.
Efi Gen- Curator
Symptoms | Four names and two birth days
Anat Grinberg ,Netanella Auslender ,Ron Vinter | Curator Gilad Padva
Why “Four names and
two birthdays”?
Alina Rom Cohen
Bat Candies | Installation
Alina Rom-Cohen, an interdisciplinary artist versed with video art, writing and sketching has been preoccupied in the past few years with broken and re-glued glass installations.
Every positioning is like an unwritten story, available for the viewer’s reading and decryption, in accordance with contemporary contexts, far and near. In “Bat Candy”, the viewer steps into a fictional, narrative world, made out of black, see-through glass. In one room, there are characters – a black child in front of a black woman, sitting and creating/knitting glass threads with a spinning wheel. The threads, like a spider’s web, give the room an ominous atmosphere. Small bats are hanging upside down from the threads, as colorful and tempting as candy.
A bak crow adds to the room’s ambience and associatively leads us towards a supernatural realm. The artist is the bearer of ancient affinity to sorcerers and priests, invites us through the installation to an experience that has seemingly become far away from us, but is forever present in children’s literature and has become archetypal. In another room is a black laborer made out of broken black glass, and a ‘bat-child’ figure made out of clear glass, dignifying the strange possibility of shifting from human form to that of an upside-down bat, inspecting reality from various directions. Clear vs black, one in front of the other.
Beyond the very specific and current story in our world – A reaction to the black refugee, the product of predominantly forced immigration, trying to find their place in the western world – there’s a quality to their body’s positioning and the quasi-symbolic state of these people, symbols of people, of laborers, of alienation and otherness within us, a touching quality of closeness that immediately elicits empathy.
Efi Gen- Curator
Danielle Feldhaker
And the dreams are rich with colors | Installation
The Sculpted installation refers to the possibility of culture’s demise, the end of the (allegedly) established western world, as we know it.
The exhibition deals with a post-apocalyptic era and echoes universal issues pertaining to the earth’s future and wholeness, alongside the wholeness of its human inhabitants.
The gallery room holds a structure of sorts, made out of rickety wooden boards, patched together haphazardly. It can be compared to a house’s foundation. It seems as though speed, urgency or pressure manifested a structure that holds a post-apocalyptic experience. Its markings are almost abstract, an architectural ‘remainder’ of a house, a hut, a ship swept away by the threatening currents, a passageway. The structure bears the markings of a disaster (has it happened? occurred?).
Red-and-white ribbons define and surround the installation, the same way they appear where accidents, crimes and disasters happen. A blinking computer screen is positioned in one of the corners, broken or shattered, as if ‘stuck’ in a reappearing screensaver loop. Perhaps it was the last image it showed, moments before disaster hit, indicating a former world. The viewers must reveal and connect the dots, creating their own narrative.
‘The Road’, Cormack McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize winning book, tells the story of a father and son’s lone journey on a scorched road across post-apocalyptic America. Among others, this story inspired Daniel’s new work. The installation is accompanied with sounds that evokes a reality and wonder of a post-apocalyptic reality.
The hidden but present combination of voices, of a child (the artist’s son) reading excerpts from ‘The Road’, stands as another layer awaiting decryption. Traces of lives of others are hinted and scattered in the defined yet unraveled space: broken hanging lamp, large black bags set beside the structure and appear as parasites feeding off its base, and perhaps they are bags filled with clothes, loads, memories, testimonies to refugee conditions. A green plant starts climbing on the structure, maybe a sign for the possibility of rehabilitation and a new beginning. It’s unsettling and disconcerting to stand in front of this space, but at the same time, it resembles a playground, a possibility to imagine a different world.
Efi Gen- Curator
Dan Birenboim
Artist Wall | Acrylic on paper
The artist and architect Dan Birenboim exhibits selected sketches from his recent works.
By the skillful movement of a dry brush and black paint on paper, through an image of an eye, he manages to lead us to what an eye actually perceives.
The sketch surrenders to a round, natural and practically whole movement that becomes a foundation, the place in which images are seared in – the eye.
The sketches evoke a dual sensation: the motion of the paintbrush alongside the suspension of the moment. We feel on the brink of an important moment, something that requires reexamination. The near-calligraphic technique creates a moment that’s simultaneously scenic, unique and fascinating.
These round up together into new and additional characteristics of a veteran, bountiful creation, an Israeli artist who succeeds in distilling Japanese calligraphy into his work while maintaining a local sensation that remains current and relevant.
Efi Gen- Curator
Symptoms | Four names and two birth days
Curator Gilad Padva | Anat Grinberg ,Netanella Auslender ,Ron Vinter
Why “Four names and two birthdays”?
It seems as though an abundance of names, tongues and identities characterize the lives and work of these three artists, who share the burden of being descendants to holocaust survivors. However, the symptoms they experience as holocaust decedents – From compulsive hoarding and over-sensitivity to abandonment anxiety – act as putty in their hand.
Anat Greenberg presents innocent and traumatic memory flashes, barefoot and merciful, stemming from the realization that memories would never stop staring back at her, even as they become faceless and obscure. Ron Winter directs a sober, critical, merciful and loving gaze at his relationship with his mother, wrapped with dependency and separation, exploitation and care, but mostly unconditional love;
Daniella Auslander embeds images of her relatives – some of whom survivors and others perished in the holocaust – into her own flourecentic self-portrait. The unresolved relationships between family hood and dependence, dark memories and deluded forgetfulness inspire a wounding and caressing work of art, processing symptoms into gems.
Dr. Gilad Padva – Curator
