Video in the Round / A Trilogy of Video Exhibitions / Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art

Third exhibition in the series: Double Take Triple Give

  

Opening: Thursday 20.1.2011, 20:00.

 

On opening night, 20.1.2011, at 20:30, a meeting and discussion will be held with:

Chen Tamir (curator of the exhibition), Douglas Paulson (Parfyme), Niki Russell (Reactor), Edgar Arceneaux and Sue Bell Yank (Watts House Project), and Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose

 

Through: 12.3.2011

 

Double Take Triple Give

Artists Gil & Moti, Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose, Teresa Margolles, Coco Fusco, Watts House Project, Parfyme, Ghana Think Tank, Reactor

Guest Curator Chen Tamir

  

Double Take Triple Give looks at projects that belong to the general school of Social Practice. Artists working socially share a desire to make art beyond the gallery, to facilitate collective exchange, to realize an approach to creativity past individual authorship, and to avoid capitalism’s grip on art.

Over the past few decades certain artists have engaged the process of generating culture directly, communicating to a public not via an image or object, but through an experience they create. The exhibition Double Take Triple Give is an experimental investigation of the conditions under which we receive these new modes of socially based art. Each of the projects on show pushes the boundaries of social interaction – some focus on civic engagement and public service while others look at role-play or attacks on the individual through quasi-violent interventions.

Each of the works, which are projected onto large screens surrounding the museum's second floor, is paired with a “talkback station” at the first floor. At each of these visitors are invited to respond to the corresponding work. The accumulated responses make up a parallel work itself. This experimental curatorial set-up intends a double function: it links the works back to the social sphere, challenging the hermetic nature of the art gallery, and it also supplements the artists their authorship by letting others speak for the work.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog (in Hebrew and English), which includes an essay by the curator, as well as a short story by Laura Mott, curator at the Göteborg Konsthall and visiting Lecturer at the Valand School of Fine Arts in Sweden. Mott's story is published here for the first time, along with a Hebrew translation.

About Video in the Round

Video in the Round takes the round space of the museum and transforms it into a screening hall, with screens hung one after the other to create a complete circle in the museum space. Three guest curators were invited to respond to the temporary arrangement of screens, which redirects the viewer’s gaze and creates new conditions for viewing the works and for orientation in the space. Three group exhibitions, with participating artists from Israel and abroad, will be presented consecutively. Each offers a reexamination of the display possibilities for video works in the museum space. Each exhibition in the trilogy comes with a comprehensive catalogue as well as public events, including performances, conversations with artists, and conferences.

The first exhibition, Signals, curated by Danna Taggar Heller (23.9–6.11), explored sign language from different angles: authentic sign language, invented sign language, iconic gestures, or signs as instructions. The second exhibition, What is the Political, curated by Maayan Amir (25.11.10–8.1.11), strived to create a polyphonic public reflection by artists and theoreticians in various fields, on the question of what is the political and how its mechanisms of representation and repertoire of images operate. The trilogy of exhibitions will be rounded off with Double Take Triple Give, curated by Chen Tamir, which investigates the circumstances and ways in which culture is received and perceived, and presents video works that are an outcome of artists’ interventions in the social sphere (20.1–12.3.11).