SITE
Curator: Yair Barack
The group show takes up both of the gallery's large spaces, assuming the gallery wall is an occurrence site. Unlike in traditional group shows, the works in this exhibition were not created in the studio and brought into the display space for the show – these were conceived in the display space and adapted to one of the gallery's walls as an in situ act.
Noga Yudkovic-Etzioni presents a sculptural installation whose basic units recall a hive, an economical form that opens and closes, defends the separations in the wall, the doors, etc. This structure guards, protects, and separates. The work incorporates pieces of Formica and rubber, allowing stretching and contracting. Yudkovic describes a childhood memory from the kibbutz where she grew up: an afternoon nap, during which the children were instructed to lay down with their faces to the wall. Yudkovic shows pairs of eyes in the work, which are abstract and mysterious. She calls it "Eyes to the Wall."
Hadar Tsarfaty presents a work whose surprising location in the gallery space makes it almost absent. Unlike the other works in the show, it is positioned not on one of the walls but on a high beam, a rib of a low ceiling. In line with Tsarfaty's works in recent years, since her graduation show at the Rietveld School of Art & Design in the Netherlands, this is a text-based work. She substitutes her usual textile for painting on a strip of ceiling. In opposition to the softness and physicality of her textile works, here we have something more rigid. Behind the work is a wide wall, white and silent. For Tsarfaty, the emptiness is part of the installation. The text echoing from the ceiling beam is enigmatic: a series of instructions apparently aimed inward, to the writing subject. Tsarfaty writes: "When advancing toward the point of no return, almost reaching it, you may still turn back, lose what has been done and choose, knowing that you must act again."
Riki Stollar's work is in the realm between drawing and sculpture, between two dimensions and three. She is leaning on a similar installation she has made for the graduation show of her MFA studies at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. The drawings center on hands, creating a series of human ceremonial gestures. The work addresses the need to be a part of a joint act, belong, build trust, and depend on a community, the mutual ideal. Stollar wants to ask – what keeps us together and what will the individual remember once the collective has broken up?
Amalia Rubin presents a wall collage. Units painted initially on canvas have been expropriated from it and taken out of their context as if they were freed from the work's frame. Hybrid human-bird creatures with mythological visages internalize a relationship with a clear hierarchy and an allegorical quality.
At first glance, the huge object Lucy Elkivity has hung on the wall seems like a wrong-scale necklace – one that a giant might wear. It functions like a trophy, a mementos of an achievement, a victory, a non-obvious effort. It is a protective talisman, tribal, maybe ceremonial. Each item has been collected through hard work, with the experience of handling, perhaps even a battle, like the teeth of a hunted animal.
Hayah Sheps-Avtalion's work is a photographic installation based on an image printed on archival paper seven meters long, laid on a free-standing wall in the gallery, flowing down from both sides. The wall serves as a partition between two spaces in the gallery, yet it allows the passage of light between them. The image, cascading down both sides of the wall, signifies the possibility of passage, movement, continuity. The flow of the paper iis reminiscent of the trails of meteors or falling stars, thereby enhancing the sense of movement.
Dahlia Zerachia's Fragment is a site-specific sculptural work made from a light material usually used for children's crafts. It is based on the image of prickly pear pads, the object of a local identity struggle within and outside the art field. Zerachia describes a fundamental change following October 7th: 'My prickly pear has turned white. A limp, broken plant, lacking a backbone and no longer a strong fence symbolizing separation between territories. The survival powers of the prickly pear are becoming symbolic these days.
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In recent years, Neta Lieber-Sheffer has frequently created large-scale drawing installations. Most were initially drawn in the studio and completed in the exhibition space. Here, Lieber-Sheffer enters the space without the work. It is drawn directly on the wall. She writes: 'At a time when walls, barriers, restraints, limitations, blockages, and separations have become an inseparable part of daily life, language, and thinking, the work offers a change inherent in the manner of observation. By changing the angle or point of view, these can transform into a paved path.
Etti Gadish De-Lange presents Habitat a wall sculpture made of the thin veneer strips that are identified with her work in recent years. The strips create a delicate texture with dents and varied surfaces. The work is characterized by roughness, which evokes the sense of a living body or a wild landscape. From a distance, the work seems like an abstract fabric, but as one approaches, its materiality and construction are revealed – a kind of honeycomb alluding to social structures and expanding the material interpretation of the work towards a sociological one.