Tel Aviv video and perfromance at CAC, Vilnius

[anna balint]

"Adina Bar-On" <adina_baron at hotmail.com>


[Contemporary Art Centre]- [HEREAFTER: A TIME FOR TRANSITION. Tel Aviv video] - [05 21 - 06 15 
2003]:
Artists: Rotem Balva, Adina Bar-On, Eliasaf Kowner, Nira Pereg, Ilana Salama-Ortar, Effi Weiss 
& Amir Borenstein, Ariel Yannay Curator: Stephanie Benzaquen The lecture on Israeli 
contemporary art will be held by Stephanie Benzaquen: 21st May, Wednesday at 4pm. The opening 
of the exhibition: 21st May, Wednesday at 6pm. The performance dedicated to the opening will be 
played by Adina Bar-On: the same day at 6.30 pm   "Hereafter": what will occur, here... in the 
coming minute or in an improbable future. This "Hereafter" could be as well the silence of a 
moment, the moment, which precedes the event. A tension. An in-between whose image would not 
reveal anything to the eye of the one who ignores, without sign, without clue... A passage. A 
transition.    Israel: an area of conflicts. On its boundaries since its establishment in 1948. 
And, since almost three years, a country stuck within the violent and endless conflict with the 
Palestinians. Inside its frontiers too because of its social complexity. Israel is built on the 
immigration - each flow having brought its own claims and pains, and its history. The cultural 
plurality displays within dichotomies and tensions. At last, a country which is continuously 
seeking for its identity, oscillating between the exile inheritance and the territorial 
pragmatism. A country torn between the protection of the elements that built its specificity 
and the desire for normalization, or the integration within a larger whole: difficult 
adjustment of the particularism and the globalization.   The nostalgic temptation is strong in 
the Israeli contemporary art. Nostalgia for better days, when the conflict was not so present 
in the daily life. Nostalgia deeply rooted within a particular historical vision, related to 
things that don't exist anymore and that will never come back, whatever they are, the pre-war 
Jewish world, Israel in the effervescence of its construction, the myth of solidarity and of 
the Zionist home. And nostalgia for an artistic practice that did not have, by that time, to 
untangle the muddled skein of more and more complicated political positions: then, the 
commitment was clear.   Between this intangible past, somewhat inexistent and imaginary, and 
the overshadowed future, as carrying too many questions and fears, what is left is the present: 
such a hard present which is the mark of a country locked up in its traumatisms and hardly able 
to deal with them. Somehow, a present without actual mediation.   The artists of the exhibition 
share the willingness to inscribe their creativity within new perspectives, as a necessary step 
of the mediation. Each one copes with the task to decipher differently the reality, to imagine 
other visibilities for the present and to bring them to awareness and larger interpretations. 
It is the complicated representation of a country going through continuous changes.  By setting 
in motion the process of questioning, and not through the call to a massive reaction, the 
presented works aim at reflecting the "transitory" component as an essential element of the 
Israeli reality and thinking the possibilities of transition. Like an attempt at drawing right 
now the topography of a possible future without forgetting that this future, heavy of 
contradictory schemes, remains in the hands of those who act within the present. A time of 
wait, beforehand...            In the video works by Adina Bar-On, "View" and "Motherland", the 
body, the movement and the word redraw the landscape, endowing it with new meanings. The artist 
rebuilds the relation to the territory, the earth as well as to the memory and the history 
impregnating the Israeli landscape and turns them into vectors of universal feelings and 
understandings. The reconfiguration of the environment goes too through the articulation of the 
context with other situations and through the creation of parallels in time and space. The 
documentary by Ilana Salama-Ortar, "The Camp of the Jews", through the personal witnesses about 
the transit camp of the Grand Arénas in Marseille (France) - where the artist stayed when she 
was a child - opens to connections to multiple stories of exile, displacement, loss and tearing 
and to the wider reflection regarding the structure of the camp, whatever it is, wherever it 
is, whenever it is.   The exhibited works give neither solution nor answer: they present a 
situation in its unfinished and potential aspects. There is a certain dialogue between the 
works by Nira Pereg, "Guest", and Ariel Yannay, "Surroundings", who both show building sites, 
zones of transformation. For Pereg, the human element, the artist herself, is a determining 
presence. Feelings and fears of the female character combine with the chaotic and dubious urban 
landscape, which is actually one of the central streets of Tel Aviv. It creates the oscillating 
perception of the inside/outside relationship. Text and voice of Louise Bourgeois intensify 
this oscillating subjective perception and move away from the documentation. For Yannay, the 
locations, the surroundings, are empty: building areas, of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, whose ephemeral 
aspect has been definitely fixed. The immobilized space and time reflect a context, which is 
first the daily one facing the artist, then the paradoxical view of the permanence developed 
within the temporary. The building sites are the translation of the paradigm of the transitory.   
The contradictory juxtaposition of permanence and temporary, or the continuous passage, gets 
another translation with the work by Effi Weiss and Amir Borenstein. "Vil-Nor" is the 
fictionalized version of the mythic story of the "Genius of Vilnius" (the "Gaon of Vilna"). In 
this subtly ironic work on the endless exile, which is also a never began exile, resound the 
personal perception of two Israeli artists living abroad since a few years as well as the 
essential dimension of the movement in the Israeli culture.         Eliasaf Kowner also uses 
the stories of others - the passer-by, the accidental encounter - to depict the reality, from a 
totally different point of view. He projects his own questioning towards and through the words 
and attitudes of the people which he meets and films during his walks in Tel Aviv. Sensitive 
gaze posed on two women sitting in a bar, "In the Centre" creates empathy and moments of 
identification.   Rotem Balva acts through minimal displacement and shifting in order to reach 
areas where codes and boundaries get confused. The intermediary and filtering space, where the 
rules of the game fade away and the interpretations collide, brings, through a controlled 
aesthetic process, her daily intimate feelings towards the public view. "Op-Allah" invites the 
viewer to enter the private experience built as an installation for communication.            
Contemporary Art Centre Vokieciu 2, 2001 Vilnius, Lithuania Tel: +370 5 2121954, Fax: +370 5 
2623954 info at cac.lt // www.cac.lt