Dror Ben Ami / Africa, Beirut, Gaza and Poetics
Noa Ginzburg / Dreamspot
Tova Lotan / Signed: Body
Revital Lessick / A Mare with a Thousand Faces
Curator: Rotem Ritov
In the novel “the Neverending Story”, the evil force that threatens to destroy the Kingdom of Fantastica (and as a result the real world) is “the Nothing”. “The Nothing” is not exactly a character, it is not a horrific creature, a corrupt leader or a supernatural power. “The Nothing” is a phenomenon represented by darkness that is generated, takes over, and grows because of a lack of imagination and a human unwillingness to imagine. “The Nothing” is revealed in the story as a mysterious and dark phenomenon whose only intention is to make the world of imagination extinct. “The Nothing” is the metaphysical representation of an absence of the senses of wonder and enchantment, which leaves humanity in a state of indifference, cynicism, lack of empathy and denial of dreams. Everything is sucked into “the Nothing”.
Infinite Simultaneity is a group of four solo exhibitions in which the viewer is invited to delve deep within those very places that “the Nothing” would have liked to suck into the darkness. The viewer is invited to take their time, slow down, walk around and take notice of the simultaneous presence of both the large, revealed elements and the concealed/hidden details, which together make up the complete experience in each of the four solo exhibitions.
The magic that builds the backbone of the works is created in the unexpected places, thanks to the multitude of occurrences that happen all at once. We will not notice most of them, but our sensory and physical systems pick them all up at any given moment. The four participating artists touch, treat, engage, express and realize, through the language of plastic art, those very concealed areas – physical, intellectual and imaginary – which enable philosophical, aesthetic, scientific and psychological questions to emerge and even to endure.
Humans are imaginative creatures that invents and thinks. An object of art is an item with baggage (cultural, philosophical, historical, local..) which the artist offers to those who like to daydream, those who enjoy being moved by something new, those who like chains of thought and inspiration, and for all art lovers.
“For poor is the mind that always uses the ideas of others and invents none of its own.” H. Bosch
*Image on invitation: detail from “Grotesque Figures” by Hieronymus Bosch, engraving, 16th century[1]
Mixed media installation
The installation Signed:Body should be viewed both as a single installation work and as an installation of independent elements (large and small alike) which contain autonomous events. Signed:Body is a place to linger, a spatial artistic experience which asks the viewer to envelop themselves in its forms and become part of the empty spaces that connect its parts: to become part of the material, emotional, historical and philosophical baggage that the installation contains. The abstract form derives from and maintains traces of the material’s former function (garment) and the body is concealed like a stamp embedded within it and in the forms like a latent marked object. Lotan “clothes” the space and adjusts the works to its dimensions. The installation Signed:Body is a middle point between garment and home, and between flat, spread-out forms and three-dimensional sculpture. This, while the body is both present and absent in the large landscape structures that occupy the space. The elements in the installation uphold what Lotan terms the “Principle of Wrapping” which finds its various forms of expression in the body that is wrapped, wraps itself and wraps the other – an act founded in acquiescence and turning to an imagined space, a paused intermediary state between waiting and passage.
For Lotan, choosing the everyday garment expresses an emotional state. She treats the garment like a second skin which expresses the specific emotional state of that day: “A coat is not just a fashion accessory! It symbolizes being. The meaning of deconstructing coats as part of artmaking is deconstructing series of moods, of being during different periods. Taking the coats apart is giving one thing up and choosing to go towards something else. In the form composed of garment parts, a new structure is created, which preserves something of what it was. It is not just a construct; it is a construct that from the outset concerned wrapping and caressing”.
Her inquisitiveness regarding material is also expressed in theoretical inquisitiveness and inspiration regarding philosophical texts connected to theories of space, of the kind that address the relationship between body and exterior covering, body and object and body and space. These include the theories of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott[4], who pointed to early, pre-verbal experiences in the mother-child sphere as molding the person as a spatial entity both in the physical (the body as a spatial object) and mental (the soul’s experiential emotional conscious topography) senses; philosopher Gaston Bachelard[5], who through literary representations researched the concept of home as a sensory-emotional experience for understanding the structural-notional dimension of domesticity as an intimate dwelling (that which transforms a space into a dwelling place, a home); and the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu[6], who also focused on early experiences through the study of the connection between the ego and the external skin in order to understand how the experience of being is generated in the world.
Despite the use of soft materials, Lotan’s works are Modernist, Formalist, abstract and her artistic language is Brutalist. There is emphasis on crevices, protrusions, cuts, rips and connections on the surface and in the skeletal structure. All of these contain and preserve the signs and traces of the garment construct, and the skeletal structure’s internal logic is revealed in the act of the garment’s decomposition. In an act directed backwards, an act of reverse-engineering, the garment is transformed into another product – an enveloping structure.
The distanced, external glance is like viewing the architectural structure, and the close glance enters the depth of the seam.