Which Does Not Cease Not Being Written
Exhibition
May 5 - June 2 2018
The Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon
curator: Yoni Niv
Participating artists:
Hilla Ben Ari, Amir Givon, Sharon Glazberg, Yonatan Geron, Denis Mashkevich, Meital Covo, Or Rimer, Galia Einey and Ira Shalit
Curator: Dr. Yoni Niv
Opening: May 5, 20:00
The opening event will include performances by Hagai Izenberg, Maxim Turbo, HaTehomim, Kashaiof, Zohar Shafir, Maya Dunietz, Tom Soloveitzik, Itamar Weiner
The exhibition will be presented from May 5 to June 2, 2018
Which Does Not Cease Not Being Written presents works by students from the Advanced Studies Program in Experimental Composition and sound art at Musrara School together with works by guest artists. The one-of-its-kind program in Israel combines the teaching of composition and sound art, modern performance and critical theory in order to expose its students to groundbreaking contents and experiences through in-depth work in the context of contemporary art.
The exhibition sums up a process of several months, in the course of the program’s residency at the Center, in which the students developed works as well as worked on curating the exhibition. Which Does Not Cease Not Being Written focuses on the relation between body and language, a theme that was formulated through a joint exploration of the concept of The Object Voice. Like the gaze or handwriting, the voice is an ontologically questionable object – an intermediate site between body and language. In itself, the voice is not a body, but a kind of second-order body, a recollection or notation of a body, that dissipates immediately upon its appearance. The voice is the material platform of language, a carrier of meaning, but in itself, it is shorn of all meaning. The works presented in the exhibition address that interim or hybrid space between body and language in different ways.
Yonatan Geron presents Untitled, a work made of live crickets and light fixtures, which he describes as a “dance of disruptions”. The light fixtures and crickets maintain a reciprocal relationship, together constituting a dynamic ecosystem.
Or Rimer’s sound work Ponio combines elements of organized narrative, streams of consciousness and musical moments that coalesce into an audio play on the golden age of the Colombian soccer team. Rimer’s protagonist is Juan, a Colombian tattoo artist and musician, who immigrated to Israel in his early twenties. Juan’s language – a hybrid of Spanish and Hebrew – is musical, theatrical and unique, and it appears his entire body is mobilized to the task of speech.
Denis Mashkevich presents a selection of calligraphies out of a larger series developed over the past few months under the inspiration of this time-honored tradition. The artist’s graphic language does not conform to a particular tradition, however, but speaks his medley of languages: Russian, Hebrew, English, Japanese, Phoenician and ancient Greek – all in one.
In Galia Einey’s Ezo, the exhibition space itself is duplicated. Einey photographs and records a simple performance act of sticking duct tape in the gallery – geometric lines and shapes, meaningless signs and words – and screens the performance back onto the exhibition wall. Her video and sound editing demonstrate the condensation of past and present.
Sharon Glazberg is busy Reexamining Old Objects: two statues (or what she calls “hybrids”) made of stuffed birds whose faces are covered with plaster casts.
Hilla Ben Ari’s silent video work Horizontal Standing (2008) ostensibly documents a single posture of an amputee gymnast: a scene that is touching as it is captivating, due to the tension between the athletic-theatrical presentation and the extreme physical effort of one who will no longer get off the beam.
Ira Shalit presents several works collectively titled The Single Cigarettes (2011-2017), borrowed from a series of some 60 drawings made over the past few years. The drawings have been made on A4 pages, combining various techniques (computerized and manual sketching, hard pen and soft pencil). The series depicts dreamscapes with an internal logic inspired by intuition and imagination.
Amir Givon presents the work Permanent Flux. It is a drawing of bicycles, trees, airplanes, cars and chairs that recur in different variations and develop into what Givon calls “a-scenarios”.
Meital Covo presents Les Somniloques Commencent à Parler. Covo has recorded her sleep for forty nights, and edited that documentation into a sound piece for a single listener.
The exhibition is a product of the ongoing collaboration between Musrara: The Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society in Jerusalem and the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon.