This exhibition was another Collaboration work  with and Dorit Figovich Goddard and Noa Tavori.

We worked together on several projects since 2011, along with our individual artwork.

Until this exhibition, our collaborative work has taken place in abandoned sites, where we created sculptural actions that intervene in and respond to the spaces. We have worked in places with history and character, for instance the old police station building in Tel Aviv (Inside, 2011) and a private house awaiting to be demolished (Half Board, 2011). We found a piece of reality we could interfere with, a space that was empty of life but rich in the specificity of details, of the lives of its former occupants.  The locality and specificity of the site offered us a space for reaction and intervention.

 

In Barbur Gallery- On a Clear Day,  the situation was different – an active, living place with a “white cubesque” exhibition space, that purpose is to change with each exhibition.

And so, we adopted a different approach, setting out to bring fragments of everyday reality into the gallery. Wished to create an environment where reality has stood still; "a sculptural landscape”.

The objects and materials were culled from local daily life: a wardrobe, cactus plants, and elements of domestic interiors and urban exteriors. The objects served us as a means to point at the implosion of internal and external systems. Objects that were removed from their source – phantom objects of sorts. The separation from the source and its conversion to something else wishes to allude to the inherent danger in a violent attempt to take over reality.

Tour

Before entering the exhibition space, the visitors encounter a low wall placed in front of the entrance to the gallery, forcing them to walk around it.

The entrance to the exhibition space passes through a wardrobe that wishes to transport the viewer from one place to another. While in Narnia,[1] the children are transported through the wardrobe into the fantastic realm, here its purpose is different: it does not carry the viewers to a mythical or mythological world but rather back to our reality, in its alienated version.

Inside the gallery we come across an inflatable sculpture that occupies a large part of the exhibition space. It presses against the ceiling beams, thwarting its will to ascend.

The gallery also features concrete casts of cacti, an object that anchors time a moment that has already passed, shifting it to weight and shape. The big inflating object looks as though it hovers above a wardrobe sprawled on its back; its open doors expose its damaged underbelly. The interior of the wardrobe is filled with white wax.

The exhibition On a Clear Day wishes to characterize a state of stagnation and perseverance through the presence of a duplicated reality, the fixed mechanical noise of the object’s inflation and deflation, the endless repetition of the sounds of fighter planes dropping over our heads, and the persistence of domestic objects that also turn into the shells of nature – standing still in the face of the commotion.

 An image of a garden prompted us to adopt the image of a "sculptural landscape," whose silent space becomes the violent moment that stood still.

 

Dorit Figovich Goddard, Noa Tavori, Adi Weizmann

Curator: Abraham Kritzman