Shesh Besh

Alona Rodeh’s work brings together an assembly of plywood structures concentrated densely on a low- ying wooden platform. Sound shakers concealed in the platform base transmit only bass output, thereby generating a recurrent blast which transforms into a rough and persistent low audio blend repeating itself in a gripping, hypnotizing rhythm. In response to the intensity of the sound waves, the structures installed on the platform tremble, producing a continuous background noise. The ostensibly-formalistic sculptural body is thus revealed as a body full of life, wrapped by a real potential of losing control. The accumulation of sound conveys a ritual, tribal feeling; interestingly it also connects with the historical essence to which the structure—reminiscent in shape of ancient burial structures such as the Mesopotamian Ziggurat or the Aztec Step Pyramid—refers. The result is a combination between a subtraction of visual and musical details which lead to external regulation and restraint, on the one hand; compression and an erupting physical density which appears violent on occasion, on the other.
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[Construction of sound system: Ronni Shubinsky
The work is an elaboration of a detail from the piece Friday (Reduced)
created in collaboration with musician Maya Dunietz]

Daniel Mann’s video consists entirely of existing raw materials: Super-8 films shot by his father during the family’s world travels were edited to form a new meta-narrative which is no longer real, but not invented either. The use of the original footage taken by the patriarch over the years subverts the father’s status as leader of the familial narrative, undermining his authority to recount the single, representative story, instead introducing a very different narrative alternative; a structural deconstruction of the nuclear family. By means of external narration, an obscure story, possibly historical, possibly futuristic, is constructed and spun, generating great tension and leaving the viewer alert as the sense of catastrophe hovers inexplicably in mid-air. Appropriation of the original footage and its re-editing expropriates it from the traditional familial context, infusing it with a new implied context. The recurring crucial motif is the search which is also a flight, the eternal drawing away from home in a circular route of wandering which has no clear finish line. The link between the private home and the national home is implied throughout the film, yet not explicitly specified. At times it seems like a propaganda film, at others—like a documentary about a family of refugees seeking a new home. The title contains temporal reversal, the mixture between cause and effect, the innate inability to mediate the experience.

Jumana Manna’s installation consists of three bent, distorted flagpoles protruding from the exhibition floor, shot into its space, so that their ends are tangential to its ceiling, only to fold in on themselves like withered flowers. Both monumental and heart-rending, the flag poles dominate the space, carrying a bleak political message with them. The introduction of civil sphere indication into the exhibition space disrupts its whitened tranquility, forcing the viewer to physically and mentally confront the occurrences in it. The title of the work channels its reading towards a local historical wound that has not yet healed, concealing mourning, yearning, struggle, and hope at one and the same time.

Lea Golda Holterman’s work comprises a single image simultaneously presented on several billboards throughout the city, as well as in the exhibition space. The photograph features a dark-skinned young man wearing an Armani shirt, a scarf with a pattern reminiscent of a keffiyah, embedded with an image of the Temple Mount, tied to his head.

Lior Modan’s work is akin to an ironic obelisk consisting of an iron base, a body of compressed wax, an old box spring, and a tin umbrella. The obelisk is based on recurring structural shifts taking place around a rotary inner axis, making for a multiplicity of gazes not only at the work, but also inside it, into the inner realms it generates. The box spring at the heart of the work pays homage to the amateur antenna prototype made in the 1930s. In this work, however, it also functions as a type of sounding board, calling upon the viewer to construe the obelisk as an antenna which transmits, echoes, and projects inward, into itself.

Matan Ben-Tolila’s work combines reality and fantasy. Two tall, bald, pointy mountains tower behind a wall whose shape echoes the Separation Wall. The gaze into the depth of the painting, toward the mountains, is blocked, and the wall, extending breadth-wise across the diptych, cuts the work, misleading the viewer in the aesthetic-formalistic interplay of its apparition. Amid the work’s recurrent acts of repetition, distortion, filling, and subtraction, it seems as though Ben-Tolila strives to combine figurative and abstract painting somehow.
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[Loan of the Geny and Hanina Brandes Art Collection, Tel Aviv]

Expressive, sensual, and harsh, Maya Bloch’s portrait paintings are usually made after anonymous old photographs in which she exposes an oscillation between the foreign and the familiar, an aspect pursued through the mediation of painting. Between memory and hallucination, the paintings evolve layer upon layer, like the strata of consciousness from which they are hewn; figuration over abstraction, abstraction over figuration, until they gather an independent status entirely divorced from the photographic original.

Naama Ben Yosef presents two separate works. One, an enlarged wall fan which seems to have been exposed to extreme heat and has melted. Its blades appear to dissolve and drip, its movement is slow, and it lacks clear functionality, as it barely gathers momentum and fails to move the air around. A hardened layer of black tar has inexplicably accumulated on one of its blades, reinforcing the violence potential accompanying the work’s presence. The other piece is a photograph presented on the wall, exposed, while water drips on it slowly, dissolving its surface and blurring its contour. In so doing, the dripping and gathering water drops generate a new image of sorts outlined directly on the wall, an abstract painterly image which is enhanced and fixed precisely the sparser and blurrier the photographic image becomes. Ben Yosef thus endeavors to undermine prevalent mediumal distinctions, and in some way transform the photograph into both a painting and a sculpture, generating a situation where destruction and construction are inseparably bound.

A video featuring the portrait of Farid el-Atrash performing the song “No One Like You” solo is projected on an elliptical Gobelin painted white and hung in a frame of wood and gold. The singer emerges from the darkness, his face heavily made up like an odd death mask, and the melodramatic quality of the lyrics is heightened and emphasized by his gestures and facial expressions. Appearing and disappearing, moving and touching but also farcical, Atrash’s theatrical singing resembles a struggle for life, ultimately dependent on an external, separate factor. The presentation of the Gobelin within this given frame lends the work a domestic appearance, but also a majesty historically associated with the heritage and status of the figures whose portraits are thus presented. This additional context extracts Atrash’s portrait from the narrative-romantic context of the film, articulating the complexity involved in the presentation of a portrait, any portrait, in the 21st century. The fact that only the singer’s voice is heard at certain moments, while his face is seen at others requires the viewer to explore the fixed ways in which he is accustomed to view images or listen to sound.

A video featuring the portrait of Farid el-Atrash performing the song “No One Like You” solo is projected on an elliptical Gobelin painted white and hung in a frame of wood and gold. The singer emerges from the darkness, his face heavily made up like an odd death mask, and the melodramatic quality of the lyrics is heightened and emphasized by his gestures and facial expressions. Appearing and disappearing, moving and touching but also farcical, Atrash’s theatrical singing resembles a struggle for life, ultimately dependent on an external, separate factor. The presentation of the Gobelin within this given frame lends the work a domestic appearance, but also a majesty historically associated with the heritage and status of the figures whose portraits are thus presented. This additional context extracts Atrash’s portrait from the narrative-romantic context of the film, articulating the complexity involved in the presentation of a portrait, any portrait, in the 21st century. The fact that only the singer’s voice is heard at certain moments, while his face is seen at others requires the viewer to explore the fixed ways in which he is accustomed to view images or listen to sound.

Noga Inbar’s work touches upon the structuring of history, questioningthe notion of truth deriving from it. Inbar sketched several structures on old notebooks, which she copied from Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, a book that offers a critical reading of the deserted bunkers scattered along France’s southern coast since the end of World War II. On the wall, next to the drawings, appears the inscription “All is secured, nothing is true,” extracted from a text by the anarchist group The Invisible Committee, ridiculing in many respects the attempt to generate a protected, closed setting, since it is unclear against what the protection is exactly required. The work continues Inbar’s exploration of power and authority structures, and mainly the way in which they are manifested in an architectural context in various sites of signification, such as mental asylums.

Peleg Dishon’s work explores the material presence of light in a given space. The image—drawn from a real platform, and constructed in Dishon’s piece from countless paper cutouts which he builds, layer upon layer, and finally scans to form a single-surface work—reveals light as a substance in several ways at once: in the light beams exposing the depth of the stage, as a material structuring the scanned image in reverse, and as the decisive element without which the final image—presented in an open light box based on a construction which imitates a professional lighting rig—cannot be seen. The title of the work alludes to a certain type of flood lights—blinders—mounted on stage and pointed directly at the audience, to create a blinding effect and allow for a scene change. The flash erases memory, but at the same time, as opposed to darkening, etches a silhouette, an elusive residue, on the retina.

Tamar Harpaz’s work oscillates between the static and the dynamic, relying on a cyclical, repetitive principle. A piece of glass inserted into a slide projector produces an abstract image on the wall. The distortion generated by the glass in the projector’s automatic focus results in an infinite mechanical search motion for the focal point of the projected image, a movement which makes the image inflate and shrink alternately, until it seems to breathe. Another image is projected alongside this work, simultaneously and alternatingly presenting two perspectives from a duel scene. This image also appears to breathe, and moreover—it seems trapped within itself, in the endless tautology of its movement. The title of the work indicates a potential narrative link between the two works pertaining to the gold rush which characterized the period addressed by the film from which the duel scene was extracted, Once Upon a Time in the West.

Tom Pnini’s video works distinctively use handicraft. They are sewn, sculpted, and staged intimately, based on an analogue link, real in the physical sense of the term. In the work in the exhibition, Manhattan’s skyline is presented as it is seen from the opposite Brooklyn coast, with a star shining every now and then. The star is, in fact, a giant helium balloon sewn by Pnini, which he asked a friend to hoist in the air with a 700 meter- long string, while Pnini, based in Brooklyn, directed a giant projector at the balloon and filmed it from a distance. The dimension of exposed illusion, typical of Pnini’s works is also discernible here, since the balloon twinkles and may be seen only when the light beam indeed hits it and is reflected off it, thereby exposing not only the principle on which the specific work relies, but also, perhaps mainly, the desire innate to each and every one of us, to believe in what we see.

Tzachi Buchbut’s work consists of a large-scale mural simulating and simultaneously distorting the pattern of a backgammon (Shesh-Besh) board. A piece of fabric is suspended from the ceiling above the painting, likewise cut in a repetitious geometrical pattern. The work sustains a tension between a direct, unequivocal dimension manifested in the mural, and a soft, ostensibly elusive dimension manifested in the fabric cutout, thereby exploring the two-way spillover between twodimensional and three-dimensional, soft and rigid, stable and mutable. The title of the work alludes to the potential inherent in the encounter between the viewer and the work, a potential which generates a continuous state of structural illusion and visual transmutation, accompanying the viewer’s movement in the space.

Yael Efrati’s work misleads the viewer. At first sight it seems to replicate existing mundane objects, and that the very act of their duplication and display as sculptural objects in the space introduces an estrangement. A domestic wall bearing an electric outlet or rectangular lamps used to mark municipal street names, thus transform into minimalist, abstract opaque objects cut off from a functional context, and abruptly exposed to interpretation. A closer look at the works reveals that Efrati not only duplicates them, but introduces a shift as well, and that the work process is in fact based on a photographic perspective. The wall piece simulates framing and cropping of a real wall section, which in turn spawns a landscape image, whereas the lamp work relies on perspectival distortion typical to photography, one which the eye corrects automatically, but the camera captures and perpetuates. In doing this, Efrati explores the material, visual, and conceptual transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality, between photography and sculpture, matter and concept.
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[Thanks to Giora Shachal and Hila Laviv]