|
Video in the Round | A Trilogy of Video Exhibitions | Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art Opening Thursday, 23.9.10, at 20:00
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 for a month each. Each offers a reexamination of the exhibition 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 (curator: Danna Taggar Heller), explores sign language from different angles: authentic sign language, invented sign language, iconic gestures, or signs as instructions. The second exhibition, What is the Political? (curator: Maayan Amir) strives 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 (curator: 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.
Below is a press release about the opening exhibition, followed by basic information about the two following exhibitions.
Signals (23.9-10 – 6.11.10)
Guest Curator Danna Taggar Heller
Participating Artists Tal Shoshan (Israel), Gil Yefman (Israel), John Baldessari (California), Trixi Weis (Luxembourg), Jean-Luc Vilmouth (France), Ira Eduardovna (Israel/New York), Jordan Wolfson (New York), Einat Amir (Israel/New York), Imogen Stidworthy (Liverpool, UK), Romy Achituv (Israel/Seoul/New York) and Orit Kruglanski (Barcelona), Alix Pearlstein (New York), Shahar Marcus (Israel).
Signals is a group exhibition of video, new media, and installation works by contemporary artists, all of which embody the tension between the performative video medium and each artist’s unique sign language with which he tries to tell his “story.” The exhibition tries to be a junction between different sign languages (authentic, invented, iconic, or signs as instructions), and their deconstruction into body, voice, and word.
One of the inspirations for the exhibition was John Baldessari’s I Am Making Art (1971), which provided both a question and an answer to the artist’s gestures while also being a critique of the popular Body Art of his era. The exhibition asks to broaden the conversation about sign, signal, and gesture by investigating the coherence/incoherence dichotomy embodied in the sign as seen by the viewer. The visitor in the exhibition will experience a cacophony of signs, signals, sounds, and words. A hearing person will be able to understand works in which gestures are accompanied by sound and spoken text, while hearing-impaired visitors in the exhibition will appreciate the works using authentic sign language. Thus the exhibition space turns into an arena of communication that is simultaneously familiar and foreign to the different visitors in the exhibition.
One element that runs through the entire exhibition is the treatment of the museum space as a mansion – a giant, modernist, round house and a sort of “little brother” to the Guggenheim in New York, built during the same era. The museum entrance leads into the upper space of the exhibition, where one may find the children’s quarters – a space in which “everything goes”: a fanciful room by Gil Yefman; a translation of poetic/erotic texts into sign language by Romy Achituv and Orit Kruglanski; Tal Shoshan’s choreography of invented signs to the song “Badad” (Alone) by Zohar Argov; a ventriloquist act by Imogen Stidworthy; or Chaplin’s speech from “The Great Dictator” signed by a headless orator, in the work by Jordan Wolfson. Further on in the upper complex of the exhibition, Trixi Weis’s traffic signs direct the visitor’s attention to act. Between the upper space and the downstairs parlor in a spiral of eight “windows", the video work of Ira Eduardovna tells a story that takes place in different landscapes and in which the artist is given written and spoken instructions that ultimately lead her nowhere.
The exhibition catalogue (in Hebrew and English) includes a curatorial text as well as the article “I am a Traffic Sign” by Guy Gutman (interdisciplinary artist, director and musician, director of the School of Visual Theater, Jerusalem).
||||||||||||||| What is the Political? (25.11.10 – 8.1.11)
Guest Curator Maayan Amir
Participating Artists include Francesco Finizio, Pavel Wolberg, Zoya Cherkassky, Dror Daum, Roee Rosen, Keren Cytter, Sharif Waked, Avner Ben Gal.
The exhibit strives to generate a polyphonic public reflection by artists and theoreticians from various fields on the question of what is political and how its mechanisms of representation and repertoire of images work. The question of the political in art has implications for issues relating to responsibility and morality, which mirror the relationship between the artist and the society in which he works. The works in the exhibition were selected by each one of the participating artists, who were asked to choose one work of theirs and one of another artist, which they see as political. 18.11.2010 (before the opening of the exhibition): “What is the Political” – a dynamic round-table discussion, in which the audience will be invited to take active part.
||||||||||||||| Double Take Triple Give (20.1.11 – 12.3.11)
Guest Curator: Chen Tamir
Participating Artists include Coco Fusco, Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose, Ghana Think Tank, Parfyme, Reactor, Teresa Margolles.
The exhibition seeks to investigate the conditions and ways in which culture is received and perceived. In art, as in life, there are complex contradictions between our expectations and our actual experience. This phenomenon becomes all the more complex in the works presented in the exhibition – eight video works that are the outcome of various interventions by artists in the social sphere. The exhibition creates a unique model of positioning that seeks to challenge the closed nature of museum display and to reconnect it with the social realm.
The exhibition was made possible with the support of:
|
