Fall 2015 exhibitions
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
27 Shaul Hamelech Blvd
Tel Aviv, 61332012
Israel
Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday 10am–6pm,
Tuesday, Thursday 10am–9pm, Friday 10am–2pm
Public Movement:National Collection
Closing: December 10, 2015
Curator: Ruth Direktor
National Collection is a museum exhibition realized in its entirety as a durational performance. The exhibition is being held over six weeks in various spaces of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and is performed by eleven members of Public Movement. It is the first of its kind in Israel.
National Collection regards the Museum as an arena where civic behavior is staged, and where national identities are defined. The Declaration of the State of Israel took place in 1948, in the original location of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, underscoring the performative relationship between the state and its cultural institutions. The exhibition temporarily installs a reconstruction of the Independence Hall in the “Hall of Art” to demonstrate this interdependency.
Drawing on the historical and contemporary contexts embodied by the Museum’s architecture, collections, gathering spaces, and codes of conduct, Public Movement activates political and national mechanisms by engaging the participant in a series of actions and new choreographies. In this light, the Museum collection is not assessed for the material value of artworks, but as a visual body through which society is defined.
The exhibition moves through the Museum’s galleries, as well as spaces that are usually closed to the public, while Public Movement Members perform a series of ceremonies, short speeches, rituals and processions. The second part of National Collection, the performance Debriefing Session II, is staged in a undisclosed location in the Museum. It is a one-on-one meeting undertaken with a Public Movement Agent. The exhibition was co-conceptualized by Dana Yahalomi and Alhena Katsof. Public Movement is a performative research body established in 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi, its director since 2011.
Public Movement Members: Ma’ayan Choresh, Nadav Eilon, Mor Gur-Arie, Laura Kirshenbaum, Adili Liberman, Gali Libraider, Meshi Olinky, Hagar Ophir, Nir Shauloff, Moshe Shechter Avshalom and Danielle Shoufra
Project manager: Adi Nachman
More information here.
Facebook event here.
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: 17 Screens
Closing: March 26, 2016
Curator: Meira Yagid-Haimovici
Designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (b. 1971 and 1976, respectively) have been working together for over 20 years now. The French duo of designers derives its approach from observing different situation of daily life, both indoors and out in the open—work environments, urban areas and nature—which they reinterpret into new spatial states and conceptions. Their childhood landscapes remain an enduring inspiration, with views such as the pastures of Bretagne by the Atlantic Ocean or moss tangled up in the barks of trees ingrained in their imaginative psyche as organic formations of interweaved growth—shapes that they translate into a lightweight architecture of modular and transportable pieces in a malleable typology.
Many of the furniture pieces realized by the Bouroullec brothers also double as space definers, which, unlike fixed walls, can be altered and moved around. The scope of their work arguably reflects the evolution in the typology of living spaces in recent decades: the change in spatial hierarchies and designations as private studies tend to gradually disappear and circulation in spaces assumes a more complex dimension, which provokes, in turn, a growing need for intimate areas within shared spaces.
17 Screens resulted from a year-long research into the possible affinities among different disciplines of arts, crafts, materials, novel techniques and methods of traditional craftsmanship. The resulting sensorial view of overlapping tactile elements, seen here for the first time, activates the space in a web of unique prototypes that manage to convey a human touch.
The Brothers Bouroullec have worked for leading design companies, including Vitra, Magis, Established and Sons, Ligne Roset, Alessi, Cappelini, Matiazzi, Flos, Kvadrat, and Glas Italia. In recent years, their work has been featured in two comprehensive exhibitions: at the Pompidou Center in Metz in 2011, and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2013.
Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archive
Closing: February 3, 2016
Guest curators: Noam Segal, Raphael Zagury-Orly
Benjamin is undoubtedly one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. His paradoxical way of thinking, at once concise and profound, moves from one extreme to the other: through past and future, nostalgia and revolution, history and politics, materialism and mysticism. As in the question of his identity as a Jewish-German or a German-Jew, these issues too are expressed unequivocally in his writings, with novel thoughts and illuminating interpretations.
Surprisingly, given that Benjamin is a Jewish thinker and one of the most interesting philosophers of our times, his work has never been shown in Israel. The current exhibition presents archival materials generously loaned by the Walter Benjamin Archive housed at the Akademie der Künst in Berlin. These include manuscripts, original notes and lists, letters, diary entries and postcards.
The exhibition examines different aspects of Benjamin’s character: the Berlin of his childhood from a biographical angle; his dialogues with contemporary thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht and others; his ideological and literary links with such figures as Goethe; his travel journals and intricate meditations on space and time; his unique opinion on history and politics; and, of particular interest, his complex perceptions regarding the issues of Zionism, Messianism and Jewish identity.
In addition to the archival materials the exhibition also presents works of art that extend and elaborate readings of Benjaminian philosophy, and release it from the grip of the written word—a role which Benjamin himself sought to find in art, particularly in images. Thus the exhibition offers a broad spectrum of archival concepts along with intricate introspections that might be characterized by their Benjaminiam twists and turns, rather than a direct preoccupation with the thinker. Participating artists: Micha Ullman, Leonor Antunes, Sarah Ortmeyer, Uri Aran, Avner Ben-Gal, Dor Guez, Yonathan Vinitzky, Shahar Yahalom, Haim Steinbach, Eli Petel, Yona Friedman, Sigal Primor and Paul Klee.
