From Oceanic Desolation to a Desert Enclav
Curator: Dana Haras
Shani Avivi | Roni Ben Porat | Tamir Chen | Lilach Yaron | Noa Mor
In a period of restricted movement, political uncertainty, and visible cracks in the collective structure, the exhibition "the Wasteland of the Ocean to the Desert Enclave" offers a space for contemplation of the edges – not as final destinations, but as sites of inquiry. The wasteland and the enclave signify an isolated area where forces of containment, seclusion, and survival operate. The wasteland, though identified with absence, silence, and detachment, also holds potential. It is an open space where existing structures decompose, and a new, unmediated infrastructure may emerge. The enclave can also serve as a refuge, a breathing space, a place where an alternative is temporarily created.
As Hakim Bey asks in the beginning of his book: "Are we, who live in the present, doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand, even for a moment, on a patch of earth where only freedom rules?" *
This question, written as a moment that is part philosophical inquiry and part yearning for freedom, is present in the exhibition as a quiet shadow, an open conceptual foundation. The notion of autonomy here is material, temporary, sometimes fragile. A moment that can be discerned from within a wasteland. Bey describes a temporary autonomous zone that does not rely on government, border, or an institution. It is a moment in space that exists on the side, in parallel, like a crack letting in the wind. A space where action is made possible that doesn't need to justify itself, but simply to exist. The exhibition focuses on these moments – on works that formulate their own local rules, a temporary body, an internal order – wastelands of material, consciousness, and image.
Upon entering the gallery, one encounters Noa Mor's works: "Tropical Melancholy," a black-and-white print, and "Tent Poles," a wall sculpture. Mor constructs bodyless yet present environments, in homage to improvised shelters. The concept of "stake," identified over the years with settlement initiatives and permanent dwelling, is here imbued with a mobile, paradoxical meaning. The sculpture functions as a sign of something that has already been dismantled – or that has never been truly grasped. The image emerging from the print depicts waves carving into rocks. Even in the most beautiful place, at the end of the world, the troubles we have fled echo back in our consciousness – similar to Claude Lévi-Strauss's book "Tristes Tropiques", where moments of awe at the landscape are intertwined with a deep disappointment in humanity.
Shani Avivi's paper work, "Scaffolding," is composed of papers from ground old books, including designs for the planning and construction of settlements and kibbutzim within Israel's borders. Embedded within the paper are materials, hidden images, crushed texts. The work deals with mapping, territorial memory, and the search for a foothold in the land, but also with questions about the very medium of the work – the fabric or canvas. What holds this identity?
Further on, Lilach Yaron's sculptures, "Elusive Trouts," are scattered. These iron creatures, resembling tadpoles or seeds, maintain a rigid yet unformed physicality. They possess a quality of blind, instinctive movement, an attempt to appear not as an embodiment but as a suggestion of displacement. The sculptures strive for visibility, yet limit themselves, seeking a space that doesn't necessarily exist.
On the adjacent wall, a part of Tamir Chen's series, "Dimension No. 8," is exhibited. The works are based on images from a personal archive of drawings, collected and scanned over time. They were then digitally processed into large maps – from which the compositions for the paintings were derived, which are then made by hand in the material. The world of images draws inspiration from the medicinal mandrake plant, with its profound and mystical fertility properties, appearing in Kabbalistic and biblical texts as a double-faced symbol of toxic fertility. The image of the mandrake is assimilated into the works and decomposes within them as a sign of a complex Creation process that seeks to transform the raw image and turn it into a new material reading.
Hovering above them all is Roni Ben Porat's work, "Black Moon." A circular wooden base on which she has applied layers of plaster reminiscent of a moon phase – appearance, subtraction, rising, and setting. Ben Porat moves between acts of subtraction and addition, between relief and painting. The shape of the moon, beyond the physical or mystical meanings it carries, appears here as a form of time, as a mechanism of an irregular cycle.
* Re’i, translation: Assaf Gavron, Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008, p. 7. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. – The Temporary Autonomous Zone.