Category: Curatorial Practice

Itamar Mendes-Flohr

Curators: Sala-Manca Group

That we’ve forgotten the rain / we recall only when it rains / and there’s no longer any point in discovering what’s been forgotten / and grieving its absence” (Joao Delgado)

The conceptual point of departure for Itamar Mendes-Flohr’s first solo exhibit is the water cisterns at Hansen House in Jerusalem. These cisterns served from the early days of the Jesus Hilfe Lepers’ Hospital (mid-nineteenth century) as a source of freshwater for treatment of the hospital’s patients and for watering the trees and plants of the compound’s autarchic farm. The exhibit transforms the spaces of the Mamuta Art and Research Center into a laboratory for artistic research about the connection between water and stone(from which the walls of the cisterns are made), motion, and light.

Mendes Flohr’s works have a performative aspect to them: they are kinetic, often simulating motion in the natural world, and they change over the course of time. In the present exhibit water evaporates, is absorbed, and shapes the materials it comes into contact with. The clash between water and stone creates moments of aesthetic discovery related to the fact that they are the basic structural elements of the former lepers’ hospital. These materials, which served for healing, irrigation, purification, and protection, are also a source of myths. Mendes-Flohr detaches them from their natural context in order to build a unique poetic reality. As an alchemist and inventor with a unique ability to observe the world of materials and their movement, he reveals connections that are hidden from the untrained eye.

The exhibit presents fragments from a rich and unique world. In the past, Mendes-Flohr was the sole guest at the Paradise Inn, a temporary structure constructed in the Hansen House garden and which only the artist could enter. During his stay at the Paradise, Mendes-Flohr created survival systems out of what was at hand in the garden as well as kinetic sculptures, including a mythological snake trapped in perpetual motion in one of the cracks through which spectators could observe the Paradise. The snake’s vertebrae were made from a sawed branch from one of the historical cypress trees of the Hansen House garden.

In his present exhibit, a water system begins in one of the pools in the hospital’s cellar and travels between the exhibit’s works to create an autarchic artistic system. Beyond water’s natural force, human control over the presence or absence of water in the day to day (diverting it, blocking access to it, evaporation, over-use, etc.), can have an influence on life or death. Mendes-Flohr’s unique use of water emphasizes this potential: water drives the aesthetic and sculptural course of the exhibit; it is its designing force.

“That we’ve forgotten the rain…” also offers a look into Mendes-Flohr’s laboratory-studio, where visitors will discover the world of the artist, researcher, and inventor: preparatory sketches for the present exhibit, parts of previous works that undergo a metamorphosis into new works and works in progress.

The exhibit is a continuation of Mendes-Flohr’s ongoing collaboration with Sala-Manca Group, which began in 2011 when he was an artist-in-residence at the Mamuta Center in Ein Karem. Since then Mendes-Flohr has participated in dozens of projects curated by Sala-Manca, in which his works have stood out for their poetical quality and the way in which they interweave nature, the human touch, and mechanical structures.

That We’ve Forgotten the Rain

Curators: Sala-Manca Group | Production: Shahar Ben-Nun | Technical Assistant: Shimri Hagai | Text editing: Inbal Keidar | Arabic translation: Nagham Abuleil | English translation: Tamar Cohen | Thanks to Galia Lulko, Yehudit Shlosberg-Yogev, Sagit Mezamer, Michael Faust, Keren Ben Altabet and Or Avishay

Review by Gilad Melzer

Opening: 15.3.18   20:00

Opening hours: Mon. and Tuesd: 12:00-16:00, Wed. 14:00-18:00, Friday: 10:00-14:00

In 1978, atomic scientist Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski shoved his head into a particle accelerator to fix a malfunction. A photon beam that was shooting around in the accelerator hit his head at the speed close to the speed of light. The scientist claimed he did not feel pain, but saw a light that was “brighter than a thousand suns.”

Yehudit Shlosberg-Yogev’s first solo exhibition, titled “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” (after the book of that title on the Manhattan Project) contains apocalyptic and poetic images that are fascinating and disturbing at the same time. Like Bugorski, for Shlosberg-Yogev, too—who created these works as part of her tenure as Artist in Residence at the Mamuta Art Center, the atomic bomb is the driving force.

The exhibition is an invitation to experience the basement space of Mamuta at Hansen House as a sanctuary for visual remains moments after the great disaster—images that appear to be taken from an archeological journey through the realms of human terror—from dread of the magnitude of human power to fear of no return.

In one of the works—A Small Step for a Man—an artificial moon appears in the desert, next to a single man fighting the wind. Is this how Shlosberg-Yogev envisions the dream of the last survivor? And what lies in the man’s futile action? Is it beauty, pathos and solitude—or humor and hope, as well?

In another work—The Journey of the Dead—Shlosberg-Yogev created a documentary film shot from the locomotive of a freight train through in the Desert of Zin in southern Israel. The train is traveling from nowhere to nowhere, passing by the Israeli nuclear reactor that we are not supposed to know that we know is there. The train’s journey, which contains many references to the history of cinema, does not document the departure from the reactor complex—the plant, production and progress—but rather the void, the secret and the threat that it contains.

The series Encyclopedias expresses a yearning for an aesthetic form of absolute knowledge coupled with revulsion from the actions of man. The encyclopedias of 1908 seek to bring together all of world knowledge in beautiful volumes. The two world wars had not yet taken place, and the new century seemed promising and hopeful. Shlosberg-Yogev plays with the encyclopedias, adding simple mechanisms and creating childish games of beauty and magic, combined with documentary material from nuclear experiments.

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns offers a sensory preoccupation with existential questions: our relationship with nature, issues of control and restriction, and various aspects of art’s approach to nature—from observation to framing, from intervention to withdrawal. The human presence at the exhibition, mediated through camera and word, gives all of these fascinating interpretations and a great beauty.

– Lea and Diego

Video works: Photographer: Itamar Mender-Flohr | Actor: Eyal Flumendorf | Video Edition and Post Production: Ofek Shemer and Ada Rimon

“Watch From a Safe Distance” – Sound Editing: Ofek Shemer and Ada Rimon | Electronics: Amir Bolzman

Books – Electronics: Omri David | Cannon mechanism: Itamar Mendes-Flohr |

Monitors: Yaniv Sheinfeld

Thanks: Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Ori Mizrachi , Alon Gaash, Galia Lulko, Nava Frenkel, Michael Marziano – Israel Train, Eytan Yogev

The Only Weapon I have is the Quill Pen” | Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Eran Sachs, Ayala Landau, Lior Pinsky

Opening: Saturday, December 30, 2017, 19:00

Opening Hours: Monday and Tuesday: 12:00-16:00, Wednesday: 14:00-18:00, Friday : 10:00-14:00

Curators: Lior Pinsky and Sala-Manca Group

Mamuta Art and Research Center

“The Only Weapon I have is the Quill Pen”  is a sound exhibition comprised of three works by four artists – Ayala Landau and Lior Pinsky, Itamar Mendes-Flohr, and Eran Sachs. The works, presented in the art space/shelter of Hansen House, render fragile moments of silence and the state uncertainty and threat contained in these moments.

A hiding place, an unexpected movement, imagined landscapes reconstructing actions unfolding in the open space (a Japanese garden sculpture, a forest of feathers, a city under siege) – the three works need motion in order to exist; or in Einstein’s words: to keep your balance you must keep moving. In the tension of potential energy, on the continuum between eruption and vacuum, we hear the voice of João Delgado (1921-1976?) challenging his adversaries: “Our only weapon is the quill.”

Each of the participating artists in the exhibition has spent extended periods in the artist-in-residence program at Mamuta. These works, created after their residencies, return to the sub-conscious discursive and intellectual space of the Mamuta Center of Art and Design, to the basements of the former lepers’ hospital, which is paradoxically one of the few spaces where it is (still) possible to reflect quietly about the possibility of a different reality.

Ofri Cnaani’s exhibition, ‘For Her Own Good’, was originally commissioned by The American Jewish Historical Society and was curated by Shirly Bahar. After visiting the show when it was presented in New York in the fall of 2017, and in light of the ongoing escalation of the silencing policy in the Israeli public discourse, we decided to invite Cnaani to present it at Maamuta’s space at the Hansen House. Before we even contacted Cnaani, she decided to remove her show as an act of solidarity with theater maker Dan Fishback whose play was cancelled because of his political beliefs. Cnaani, who focused her project on different aspects of silencing, felt that the topic of the show is what led to its only possible end under these circumstances. In her statement, the artist wrote: “speech and critical thoughts were Emma’s only weapon, and they seem to be a threat to democratic society today as much as they were 100 years ago.”

IN THE FACE OF SILENCING

“She arrived at the auditorium ready to speak in Berkman’s behalf just in time to be told by a federal marshal that unless she promised not to speak he would lock the audience out of the hall. Ordinarily, Goldman would simply have disregarded such an ultimatum, but feeling the urgency of this particular rally, she reluctantly gave the marshal her promise, then took a seat in the auditorium. When the preliminaries were over and several speeches had been delivered, the time came for Goldman’s speech. As the chairman began explaining her regrettable absence, out onto the stage strode Red Emma, a large handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. There she stood facing her audience without a word, as she had promised. It brought down the house.” (Alix Kates Shulman, Red Emma Speaks).

For Her Own Good is a mixed media installation poetically reshuffling textual and visual snippets from the multiple archives and accounts associated with the life and career of Emma Goldman. Indebted to and building on a myriad of texts, films, and exhibitions about Goldman, For Her Own Good

takes a close look at the 3 significant months of the summer of 1917 during which she was trialed, convicted, sent to two-year imprisonment and subsequently– deported to Russia. On June 15th 1917, Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested under the newly initiated Espionage Act and charged with encouraging people to refuse enlistment to the US Army which just entered WWI. On September 11th, 1917, Goldman made one of her most powerful – and as it turned out, her final -public appearance in the US. In that appearance, Goldman was on bail and thus not allowed to speak, as she was told, “for her own good.” Yet as the quote above indicates, Goldman staged a performance of both silencing and persistence that spoke for her instead. Although quite forgotten, For Her Own Good retrieved the memory of that performance, re-collecting the threads that guaranteed it lived on through the incarceration and exile of the reluctant returnee who kept writing her-story tirelessly.

Echoing the inspiring interplay between authoritative decrees and personal expressions that Goldman’s finale performance embodies, For Her Own Good weaves together her own words about her experience of that performance with words employed by officials to scrutinize and incriminate her during her trial. 21 etched glass boards display, fragment, and scatter Goldman’s story of her performance as she recounted it in her autobiography Living My Life. A video projection arbitrarily couples and scuffles between verbal procedures from the closed hearings and Dada-like visual collages juxtaposing various found objects with portraits of Goldman. A printed book with the same images and quotes rests open and available for leafing. The various media inhabit a bureaucratic-seeming setup composed of repurposed items typically or

traditionally used by archivists. As the Xerox machines assist the installation in casting its shaped shadows on the back wall, choreographed only to the subtle ticking soundtrack of a slide carousel, we are left with discreet specters of the discursive circumstances that once constituted the “The Most Dangerous Woman in America.” For Her Own Good invites us to read between the lines and cracks of light; contemplate questions of archiving, re-arranging, sorting, storing, and storytelling; and trace infinite perspectives on and narrations of the closed hearings and public non-speech of a powerful orator and performer. Perhaps we can even sense some remnants of Goldman’s rebellious spirit and affective presence that history had shed and deposited around her favorite speaking public space of Union Square.

“Have you ever been told to stay silent ‘for your own good?” Cnaani posed the question on social media, and the responses poured. In a special performance conducted on opening night of For Her Own Good, Cnaani sits down behind a desk amidst the installation and shares the stories that she collected from the responders – overwhelmingly, women– with individual spectators, who also receive a stamped copy of the heard story. Cnaani addresses her audience like a clerk granting an applicant their long desired, finally signed visa documents. Yet, instead of numbered papers that secure certain rights, the reports she reads and hands them articulate interpersonal, legislative, and/or systematic acts of deprivations and denial of the voice. The stories that Cnaani tells include testimonies of anonymous women as well as quotes from interviews with various political activists and public figures that have experienced silencing. For example, one might listen to a quote from Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian poet and citizen of Israel who has been under house arrest for almost two years in Israel for posting a poem in Arabic consisting of the word

“resist” on her Facebook account. The souvenir delivered to the spectator here is actually the very opportunity to relate to the experience of being hindered from ability to speak one’s poems, ideas, wishes, needs, or distress. Like a note from a self-help booklet, the stories convey some useful everyday tactics of how to communicate a message in the face of conditions that silence the spoken voice, despite oppression and against all odds. As this installation highlights, such tactics comprise an important part of Goldman’s legacies as an activist whose thought and action remain unpopular and challenging even after 100 years.

Shirly Bahar

September 2017

Special Thanks to: The Emma Goldman Papers, Berkeley Library, University of California The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University The Hathi Trust Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs Series: American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs NYPL Digital Collection Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Neta Shira (Cohen) Arbeli’s exhibition, A Proposal for the Israel Pavilion (Sketch), is presented in two of the basement spaces of the former leper hospital in Jerusalem. This is Arbeli’s first solo exhibition, who hitherto has created mainly site-specific works. On this occasion, she has chosen to present a series of sculptures that she created in 2016, made of readily-available and inexpensive materials—such as wood cutoffs, plaster, paper pulp, sand and glue, acrylic and cardboard.

In one of the exhibition’s two spaces of the show is a series of sculptures dealing with a construal of urban space in Israel, with references to local architecture—both Arab and Israeli. One of the sculptures is a building in vernacular style (a DIY structure, or “architecture without architects”) with a date palm tree that has either collapsed, or been placed, or fallen asleep on it—a caress, as it were, by nature of a man-made object—or perhaps a subtle allusion to demolition.

Another sculpture depicts the Kakal (JNF) Square—a circular traffic island sculpted in sea sand, with a sign of the Jewish National Fund and three trees stuck on top. This is a kind of model of Israeli urban planning, based on a work of hybrid form of nature. The foreignness of the trees is underscored by the decision to envelope them in plastic wrap.

In another installation, Arbeli presents the front of a two-storey residential building clad in Jerusalem stone—in reference to the British Mandatory law that sought to preserve local architectural traditions, as a kind of intra-cultural reference to the aesthetic politics of pseudo conservation. Arbeli’s preoccupation with the import and export of nature and culture is a recurring theme in other works in this space.

In the other space of the exhibition is an artificial sea, made of newsprint and sanitary wipes soaked in plaster and painted blue, like an everyday ephemeral reality. On this artificial sea floats a Venetian gondola, bearing several decorated camels—modified trinkets from a tourist souvenir shop in the Old City of Jerusalem, en route to becoming a memory of a visit to the Holy Land. The juxtaposition of the two icons of popular culture—the gondola and camels—undermines their status as symbols of a particular culture, and turns them into a hybrid symbol of consumerism as a product of modern tourism. The gondola is taking the camels to an unknown, horizon-less destination. Together they are sailing forth on an artificial sea, in the basement of a former leper hospital.

[images]

The Artist

Neta Shira (Cohen) Arbeli studied for a Bachelors degree at the Ceramics Department of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. After a stint as Artist in Residence at the Mamuta Center in Ein Kerem, she completed a Masters degree in Art at Bezalel. Her principal occupation is site-specific works, and sculpture.

In 2012 she took part in Ayelet Lerman’s project A Lot of Talk About Space, curated by the Sala-Manca Group at the Mamuta Center in Ein Karem.

In 2013 she presented a site-specific work at the Barbur Art Gallery in Jerusalem titled Inside Out, in which she collaborated with the artist Almog Ne’eman. In addition, she has taken part in group exhibitions at the Museum of Ashdod and at Menofim events.

Arbeli lives in Safed, where she has received an Artist-Teacher scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and teaches art at the Chabad High School for Girls, at Hannah House in Safed.

Reuven Zahavi’s exhibition “China” is named after traditionally decorated Chinese porcelain in common domestic use. Zahavi presents the Issawiyeh Tableware — a collection of disposable plastic plates which he uses as platters for his drawings. (The collection’s Hebrew name, Servis Issawiyeh comes from the Hebrewfication “servis,” meaning a dinnerware serving set.) The drawings offer a view of Issawiyeh, the large village at the foot of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, as seen from the windows of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.
Sketches depicting the Palestinian village — whose inhabitants live in dire conditions despite its inclusion in Jerusalem’s expanded municipal borders of 1967 – replace the Chinese or European landscapes associated with “china.” At times it even seems that the familiar pastoral images meld with those of the crushed village. “The village,” says Zahavi, “where smoke rises daily and booming sounds are routine, stays transparent to the Mt. Scopus community.” This transparency is conveyed by the illustrative drawings that decorate the plastic plates – flora and fauna, lakes and bridges, gardens and hunting scenes or other “Chinese” and imaginary scenarios. All of these express Zahavi’s distant stance and the posture (or imposture) he assumes towards the village and its people.
Zahavi observes the village from the grand windows of the Bezalel academy with its distinguished artistic history, thus connecting his work to a tradition depicting the Jewish landscape in Israel. But his choice to sketch the village through a foreign aesthetic tradition defamiliarizes the Palestinian village. This defamiliarization invites both artist and viewer to direct their gaze at the transparent village, to take note of the art academy’s location and position, and to contemplate the artist’s relation to both.
The choice to sketch the drawings on disposable plastic raises riveting questions regarding the status of painting and of the artist. This choice boosts the plastic’s value and simultaneously raises doubt as to the artwork’s merit. “The white plastic plate,” Zahavi says, “stubbornly refuses any paint medium. It is a cheap imitation. It is recycled in a series of ‘reflexive exercises’ whose purpose is to concretize the problematic stand of the spectator, the object and the artist via a reality of transparent oppression.”
The collection presented in the exhibition presents the artist’s stand as seemingly ironic or perhaps self-reflexive. Is the choice to immortalize the village on a plastic plate meant for disposal an expression of contempt – even if unconscious – towards the transparent village? Does it reflect the brute quality of contemporary culture? Is it an allusion to the brutal Israeli policy towards Issawiyeh villagers who are currently under curfew? Or does the choice suggest doubt regarding simulation and posturing of materials, and perhaps artistic endeavor in general, not only via itself but in its relation to reality?
The exhibition of the collection in Mamuta Center’s Underground Academy at the Hansen House as part of Jerusalem Design Week positions Zahavi’s work not only in relation to the tradition of Israeli landscape painting, but in relation to the language of design, craft and mass production. Zahavi raises questions regarding the status of the functional, disposable object in relation to reality, to the immortality of art, and even to that of the nation. “China” – a beautiful collection of highly charged sketches on a set of cheap plastic plates – comments on the very act of drawing, and contends with the erasure involved in gazing at the village of Issawiyeh from the gorgeous windows of the university at Mt. Scopus.
Reuven Zahavi lives in Jerusalem, teaches at the Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works with drawing and painting alongside digital media and is engaged in theoretical studies of craft, design and contemporary art-making.