Promising Artist Award

Many Israelis consider Israel to be closer in spirit to Europe and to the USA rather than the Middle East. This is due to the Jewish settlers who came here and changed the local landscape drastically – wilderness was disseminated, forests were planted, rivers were diverted, hills were built – all of this, in order to connect the land to its Jewish heritage. While aspiring to shape nature according to the needs of the settlers, a reverse process of connecting to the ‘local’ began taking place. Many restaurants in Tel Aviv, for instance, offer their diners local Israeli cuisine, deserting all European affiliation and bringing it closer to the Mediterranean kitchen in general and to the Palestinian kitchen in particular.

The award for the most promising artist that the couple Amir Yatziv and Ella Littwitz share, offers an incisive outlook on this double process. From their current residence in Berlin and the broad perspective they share in regards to their homeland, both artists engage in the present day through the layers and historical events that shaped it. Littwitz and Yatziv re-examine Israel’s national narrative and, the way it was told by the founders in particular.
Yatziv and Littwitz are both artists who base their work on research, on burrowing through archives, revealing untold stories, disputing narratives and finding new contexts and connections. The ‘local’ in their work undergoes reshaping and revaluation. It is reborn as a form of locality that does not aim to conceal its own past. Similar to the Zionist manipulation of the land, Yatziv and Littwitz artistically manipulate their findings and raise questions regarding the instilment of education and values; the possibility to promote multiple truths and narratives, while criticizing the erasure of Palestinian identity.

Amir Yatziv often uses unconventional photographical methods in his artistic practice. In this exhibition he presents three-dimensional laser scans and photo scans of ruins in Israel. The result of these scans is open for interpretation, just as the ruins were open for the interpretation of the new settlers. Yatziv detaches them from reality, similar to the way subjects of research were detached from reality by the new narratives which were formed around them. The works also mimic the way we perceive reality by means of certain detachment from it.

Ella Littwitz engages in transformations. By using maps, sketches and diagrams of the landscape she found in various archives, she examines the way the generation of the first Jewish settlers re-sculpted the landscape of a young country. The findings of her research solely serve as a base to an artistic preoccupation, while undergoing various manipulations which redefine the ‘signified/signifier’ relations of the final work with its origin.

Though Littwitz and Yatziv work in different mediums, their gaze is similar. It is an inquisitive gaze, resembling the perspective of a scientist who investigates all details in order to comprehend and formulate an opinion regarding the studied matter. They were both brought up
within a European vision in the Middle East and therefore it is only natural that they create their art from both a romantic and sceptical standpoint. With these works, they invite the viewers to participate in this scepticism and ask themselves: what is the future of this hybridist place in which we live, if we continue to ignore?

The worlds of Elham Rokni and Matan Mittwoch start and end with a dot. A dot in its maximum or minimum dosage, without which there is no longer any work, only a vacuum. Dots are the building stones of the works, their grammatical punctuation, their accent, it is they who turn paltry and sterile signs into articulations in a human voice and in a number of tones. The dots blow towards Rokni’s and Mittwoch’s works from different areas. To Elham Rokni’s works, they come from the east, from her childhood provinces in Iran, from the decorative plains of an orientalist culture which are both assembled and dismantled from miniaturised, molecular elements. Like many decorative works of art and craft, Rokni’s paintings also contain figurative images, most prominently those of the minaret (the tower of a mosque) and a group portrait of middle aged women – the ‘sisters’, as Rokni calls them. But this figurative beat is overtaken by a different, more abstract rhythm, made of a proliferation of dots and focused stains which grow and multiply in the body of the works’ images, but which also move outside their boundaries and even thrive near the borders of each painting itself, as if wishing to blur, cover and stitch together a large set of paintings, or alternately break them apart once and for all into a space flooded with a diaspora of cellular elements with no centre, fixed location or destination; as in traditional ornamental spaces, as in modernist movements of Decorativism, or even as in the ‘over-all’ momentum of Jackson Pollock’s painting.

Matan Mittwoch’s works belong to a different world order. They come from the very heart of a ‘first world’, the bastion of capitalism, one of whose principle agents is the art market. Although Mittwoch’s photographic works seem thoroughly abstract and formalistic, in fact they represent an entire ensemble of real, actual and existing characters, who operate mainly within a capitalist derivation of reality, realised and demonstrated through works and objects of art. The super-brands of this market serve as points of reference for three of Mittwoch’s large-scale works especially made for the current Fresh Paint art fair: a balloon in the shape and size of Jeff Koons’ balloon image is deflated, Damien Hirst’s spot painting is made even more schematic and skin-deep than the original, translated into a general sample which generates a cluster of spotty stickers, which in its turn undergoes a process of rubbing and erasure with nail polish remover. A computerised action robs Andreas Gursky of one ‘pixel’ from his mythological photograph of the Rhine, thus contracting the work’s identity – the software, the hardware, its contexts, its symbolic and financial value – into one dot. When tycoons and icons of the markets and fairs of the great, global and central ‘art world’ are transferred into a small and local market and scene, they are dwarfed, run out of breath, dwindle away, robbed of their relations, lose all aspect and character. Mittwoch conducts the elements in his works within processes of subtraction and reduction, emptying them of a stream of elementary data. One can say that his works are full of the lacking presence of the greater existence of these data. Mittwoch expresses a primeval anxiety by evoking the memory of all the numerous-absents he has emptied out of the picture, after they were supposed to protect him and the viewer from the ‘horror vacui’ and screen over it through acts of filling, condensing, inflation and artificial respiration (of Koons’ balloon for example). That is, Mittwoch’s arid works do not only confront us directly and unceremoniously with the ‘vacuum’, but also mercilessly turn our attention to what can no longer protect us from it. The flock of points that swoops down and covers Rokni’s paintings is also a version of ‘horror vacui’ – the dots and stainlets raid the painting in their droves, threatening even to reach beyond the painterly space, in a way that collaborates with the elementary/speckly ‘abundance’ that characterises her source works.

Many have already pointed out that testimonies of ‘horror vacui’ have appeared throughout history in times of crisis, when a previous world order was unravelling and a new law had not yet been established. An echo of this state of transition can be found in Mittwoch’s version of Koons’ balloon image, which is emptied out and stretched across the space like a masculine sex organ, when this time the ‘phallus’ is drooping, deflated, out of breath. In this impotence, it somewhat desperately and grotesquely insists on leaving its mark all over the empty space. A truncated, mutant phallic image often stains Rokni’s works as well, embodied by an ungrounded and feature-softened minaret, floating limply but still making itself heard, as a trill, as an image woven into the decorative web. It is a kind of ornamental ‘phallus’, whose rhythm is heard against a different beat, of a matriarchal world order as it is portrayed in the group image of the women, the ‘sisters’. The sound pattern of this ornamental ‘phallus’, heard together with the echo of an ancient women’s dynasty, becomes the basic feature of the work’s realest life pulse: the beat of the ‘all over’ throbbing in the rhythms of a decorative punctuation which pulsates on the paintings’ surface, among them and beyond their borders. This punctuation of a new-old, masculine-feminine, limp-vociferous world order also marks the heartbeat of a space that hints at its toxicity, at narratives of disintegration and annihilation. In Rokni’s case, it is a world depicted as a greenish apocalyptic landscape, attributed to an Islamic fundamentalism riddled with plots of evil and destruction, or to a darkness that calls for ‘night vision’.

In Mittwoch’s it is the apocalyptic landscape of the capital markets. That toxic (Rokni) and airless (Mittwoch) world, infected with symptoms of entropic processes in their various stages, be it as teeming with elements (Rokni) or in the final stage approaching zero point (Mittwoch), is displaced onto the sector of artistic description, in an act which today, at the historiographical moment at which we stand, we know to be like its immersion in a ritual bath of romantic trends, sublimative drives and utopian dreams about the morning after the sleepless, watchful night: a new, unblemished and good world that will be created after and out of the catastrophe. The congregation of witnesses to this last/first moment, which includes Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Monk by the Sea’ and Barnett Newman’s flickering streak of light, may also admit Matan Mittwoch’s pixel into its ranks. Like its precedents in the history of Romanticism, the pixel is presented as a basic item, as a systemic element, which is isolated from the congregation’s ranks and stands in its singularity in front of what is utterly and absolutely different from it – the image of the vacuum. Something strange and magical happens when this element stands in front of the empty space: on the one hand, it represents its system in the clearest and most total way, by presenting its element against a blank background, but at the same time and conversely it sheds all this system’s attributions and contexts, as the total persona of anonymity. In order for this radical move of characterisation, differentiation and emptying out to occur again in the firmaments of history, Mittwoch could not have chosen a more appropriate site than Fresh Paint art fair, a kind of microcosm of the Israeli art scene, with its detachment from any real market conditions. It is an almost heroic detachment, if only due to the willingness of its participants to play the role of the jester in the courts of contemporary art – on the one hand, to amplify (and even exaggerate) its gestures of control, especially conspicuous against a blank and arid background, and on the other hand, to be the stranger figure of this kingdom, whose features are disappearing into a small dot on the edge of the horizon.

Interior scenes are presented alongside exterior spaces in Zourabova’s painting. Both are articulated through a view of a curtain in the background, which appears to block off the space, infusing it with a confined, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet in this ‘block’ within the house’s space, there is also a mark of an opening which indicates a ‘border-line’ that directs the gaze towards a segment from another space: ‘exterior’, but not only as an interpretation of a fragment of the ‘natural’ world, but as an appearance of a nocturnal and hidden world which emerges out and unveils itself, comprised of images and shapes that are derived from popular fantastical graphics (Manga, for example) as well as from references to Modernist Symbolic art, such as works by Paul Gauguin or Henri Matisse.
Similar to many of the works of these masters, the ornamental and sometimes oriental patterning in Zourabova’s pieces cover all areas of the painting, specifically the carpets or curtains on the ground or windowsills. These openings are often infected with an invisible something or someone that haunts their peace. For example, diagonal strips covering the door opening like a flickering computer screen which has suddenly stopped working. As the ‘uncanny’ (Freudian) figure appears to knock on the entrances of the house, suddenly the windows of the darkened houses which appear through the slits between the window sill and the
curtain, or the blue colored light emmitted from the vacant computer screen in the room appear as the
first signs of a horrific event which rises and approaches during the dark. The places
painted by Zourabova exist in the night hours. Her figures are also preoccupied
with habitual and expected nighttime activities such as eating or watching
television. However, when they do so, their gaze already belongs to another world, that
of the darkened night that is embedded in the twinkles of the stars – both threatening
and miraculous. The bodily postures of the room’s inhabitants may appear as a
representation of the action of leaning the head on the hands in order to watch the
television more comfortably. But their wide-open eyes, their gaping mouths or their
hidden faces also appear as if they were covering their faces in a moment of terror
or astonishment, at the sight of a nocturnal vision. All of these elements in Zourabova’s
scene insinuate signs of occurrences that have not happened yet, events which
precede the grand, spectacular and more dramatic incident.
These slight fractures in the normative order of the household take place slowly,
delaying the arrival of the terrible that is to follow: A prolonged procedure which is
exerted from the frozen appearance of the objects and characters. The procedure is reflected through the painterly medium, applied manually, slowly and carefully. The
adoption of the harsh contours and the mechanical stylization that characterizes
the Japanese graphics assists Natalia Zourabova in the reinforcement of the
balance of terror and ‘passive/aggressive’ that lurks in her paintings. This is followed
by the alienation and coldness that dominate her characters. Even though the
spaces in the paintings seem to be filled with images and decorative forms, there is a
profound sense of emptiness, restlessness and discomfort which pervades the world
of characters that are staged to appear frozen and dreamy. Besides the romantic voices attached to the painting, one can simultaneously hear disturbing voices that
accompany the absurd, imbedded in the summoning of an escapist state of mind
which repeatedly dreams and evokes the phantom-like journey towards childhood
and past worlds. But nevertheless, this absurd act will be enacted again and again
as art’s raison d’etre. Without this act, art does not exist, and without art this absurd
act is worthless: It could have been a long lost dream which has expired.

Evolutionary theories, scientific research of symbiotic phenomena in nature, and self-destructing mechanisms – these are only some of the research fields from which Nivi Alroy
draws her inspiration. Her poetic, formal lexicon is comprised of a blend of discourses and far removed worlds: metaphors from the microbial world acquire formal manifestation in urban
systems, and are decoded in feminist contexts; mechanisms of chemical communication,
DNA strands, cell communities, and organic systems undergo processes of mediation,
formalization, projection, and abstraction. These are translated into intricate sculptures and
images pertaining to dependence and mutuality, calling to mind types of broken machines,
fungi, jellyfish, and billowing structures which seem to have collapsed into particles that
multiply out of bodies and are fused into domestic items, according to their own inner logic.
Alroy presents a new selection of works representing the diverse media in which she
operates: sculpture and installation, drawing and animation. The three motifs which come
together in most of her works are conspicuous in the current exhibition: furniture parts,
architectural elements, and a bubbling fluid made of white porcelain, ostensibly fusing and
infusing these elements into one another, reinforcing the sense of leakage and flow. The
architectural organism engendered by these elements – like a melting pot which spawns
organic sculptural forms reminiscent of aerial roots or weaves of surging growth in a process
of constant transformation – defies the laws of nature and does not obey the force of gravity
or any prevalent division between interior and exterior.
In Wave Land (2010-2011), for instance, the object cascade appears to grow from the
armchair upwards, as if the force of gravity were applied in reverse, whereas the structure
wave bound with electric wires and the cables trailing from the Medusa’s body in Medusa
Gigantea (2010-2011) drip onto the intimate private space of the armchair, crossing its
boundaries. All types of organization and every form of order or fixation have been totally
breached here. The city as a habitation machine and the domestic receptacles are under
constant earthquake. Threatened by the invasive energy of perpetual destruction, subsequent
to their disintegration they seem to reunite by virtue of some magnetic force, acquiring a life
of their own, transforming into living creatures which follow some latent regularity.
This sense of constant transformation is heightened in the animated piece Dripping City
(2011). Combining a video projection with a drawing executed directly on the wall, it features
an urban landscape deconstructed into its constituent elements – asbestos roofs, solar water
heaters, windows, shutters, and other parts – oozing from a building’s rooftop into a basinlike
container, only to climb back in an endless loop. The sketchily drawn handwriting and the movement embodied in the animation seem to soften the apocalyptic effect, lending the
elusive scene a vein of poetic humor.
Alroy’s works are characterized by compression, surplus, obsession, and a penchant for
detail. This is especially evident in the dense sections of her sculptural works which evoke
phenomena of Outsider laboriousness – structures made of millions of matches or ships
constructed from ice-pop sticks. In the “Hotel Utopia-Dystopia,” a special issue of Studio art
magazine (1998: 89) edited by Meir Agassi, such works were defined as “an intricate trap of
images that flood the paper with a conflicted blend of dream and reality.” Alroy’s image flood
is indeed wholly conscious of itself; still, one cannot avoid thinking of the Outsider syntax as a
type of cultural anchor, supplemented here by high dosages of grotesqueness, a manipulation of scale, constant transformation, humor, absurd, and a deflection of the functionality of familiar objects – qualities ordinarily associated in art history with the Surrealistic syntax.
The paradoxical concept behind symbiotic phenomena seems to have a special appeal to
Alroy. The engagement with mutual dependency is especially discernible in Chacun Pour Soi
(After Philippe Rousseau) (2010-2011) created after Rousseau’s 1864 painting by that name.
The painting endearingly depicts a bitch nursing her puppies while burrowing through a basket
overflowing with plates and cutlery stained with food leftovers. In Alroy’s sculptural version,
all the scale systems seem to have gone awry to the point of total collapse: the puppy suckles
from the porcelain nipple of a bitch whose head is stuck inside a cement bag lying in a deserted
urban setting, and the food leftovers are replaced by the miniaturized traces of a city ostensibly culled and piled after some ecological catastrophe or destruction. The fact that the sculpture was created during the artist’s pregnancy conceals additional meanings involving systems of control, containment and survival, mother-child relations, nourishment and compassion, and may allude to the physical, wild, and beastly aspects of woman-nature relations.
The distortion of interior-exterior relations perceptible in all of Alroy’s works may also be
read in the spirit of the feminist discourse: the engagement with the domestic sphere, with
the habitation environment which is supposed to shelter the body, yet falls apart, becoming
invaded and invading, may be construed as a symbolical disruption of order which threatens
to dissolve the soothing division of inside from outside. Similarly, the city’s vestiges dripping
like liquid waste – an expression of excess and redundancy – may embody the affinity between
processes of removal of bodily waste, and different levels of social order and domestication. This fluid state of collapse of internal and external systems attests that the distinction between the private space (the body/armchair) and the public space (the house/city) is no longer valid. The boundaries have collapsed and blended as in a tsunami – the body, the home, and the city have become elements in an imaginary food chain abiding by hidden natural laws.

Dror Daum says his recent photographs “originated in transparency collections I
gathered from the Flea Market. After sorting them, I kept the animal photographs taken
by Israeli tourists abroad.” He also mentions that photographing animals in exotic landscapes
was a custom in the travel genre prevalent mainly in the 1970s, and served as
iconic souvenirs, which were usually shared with company during slide-show evenings with one’s immediate social circle upon return to Israel. The point of departure for the
photographs is therefore the flee market, which is recognized as a reservoir of memory-images in
the figure of photographs which are channeled-emitted thereto; in this bazaar one may
also identify the traces of the moments in which photographs taken by anonymous people
embodied the transference of private travel desires into collective dreams and micro archetypical images. The flee market is also the place where one artist’s driving nostalgic
sentiment may restore the general, archetypical dream to the stronghold of the individual, of
the subject.
Daum: “From the images in these slides I isolated the animals from the rest of the scenery
by computer scanning. Subsequently I began to wander about with my camera (a large, slow
4×5 technical camera), and sought sections of local Israeli landscape to generate new habitats
for the animals.” The local landscapes photographed by Daum are sights on city outskirts,
areas which appear ostensibly less civilized and more natural. These scenery sections—the
beach on the edge of one of the coastal cities, for example, or a wild brush on its border, or
wild shrubs on the bank of a stream—seem to pinpoint local samples of other historical times
and places them in photography’s first steps of modernism somewhere in the first half of the 19th
century, times and places which, as described by Walter Benjamin, the city-dweller sought
the city’s boundaries in “attempts to introduce countryside into the city. In the panoramas
the city dilates to become landscape.”[1]
Daum identifies his photographs as “a digital hybrid consisting of several different places.”
The project, he asserts, “in fact contains two types of gazes, two different photographic
languages: amateur, touristy snap-shots and slow, learned landscape photographs.” This
photographic hybrid also fuses two dream-images pertaining to “nature”: one materializes in
the figure of the city outskirts presenting that which preceded it; the other in the figure of the
animals arriving from afar, which belong to exotic landscapes. Of the two, the animal figures
represent the dream of a “stronger” or more “durable” nature—like the image of the horse
suddenly going off on its own in Andrei Tarkovsky’s or Theo Angelopoulos’ films. In Daum’s
case too, the animals appear isolated within their photographic setting: such is the foal which
seems to have stagnated on a seaside cliff or the pair of giraffes braided together from within the range of wild growth, as if they were imprisoned and torn from that “local
nature,” despite their apparent congruence with the pattern of representation used for the
“animal in nature.” The animals’ installation within the “local nature” is accompanied by a
certain surrealistic air, the appearance of a delusion, a dream, or, in Daum’s own words, “a
fragmentary gaze which a child activates in relation to the ‘landscape’ when he channels the
image before him/her to his/her own narrative, fantastical needs.”

What is the nature of that surrealistic reflection/pen/act of hybridization featured in
Daum’s current images? Daum maintains it lies in the very fact that the works were
commissioned for the Fresh Paint Art Fair. “The current series of photographs,” he says,
“relates to the circumstances of its making, namely to the fact that this is a commissioned
work for a fair. As such, the photographs refer to this very event, striving to raise questions
about it: How is the art fair concept, so prevalent overseas, perceived when it ‘lands’ and tries
to become acclimatized in the Middle East, in Israel?” One may go even further and argue
that the detached, surrealistic, visionary facet of Daum’s present images lies in the images’
very introduction to the photographic medium, and in their very invitation to participate, as
such—as photographic images—in a fair event. Such a possibility will be valid if we take into
consideration the conditions created for the historical development of photography, whose
“flourishing” occurred, as mentioned by Walter Benjamin, in “the decade which preceded its
industrialization. … But that was closer to the arts of the fairground, where photography is at
home to this day, than to industry.”[2]
And also that: “The world exhibition of 1855 offers for the first time a special display
called ‘Photography.’ … For its part, photography greatly extends the sphere of commodity
exchange, from mid-century onward … World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the
commodity fetish. … World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They
create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background.” They merely realize
“the split between utopian and cynical elements.”[3]
This gap, discussed by Benjamin, is re-concretized somewhere, far away from the historical
site and time of the birth of photography in modernity, in Daum’s fair-dependent/hybrid/semitouristy [namely, commodified]/illusive/a-topical photographs. In one respect, the conditions in which these photographs were made and the acts of hybridization—Satanic acts, according to many—that spawned them, only reinforce the absurdity, the degeneration, and the cynicism involved in their very making as art exhibits. In another respect, however, that absurd practice, alien to the “meaningful” art world—namely, practice in an a-topical place, in the non-place of the “centers” of capital and the stronghold of the world’s central, veteran fairgrounds and art fairs—is perhaps the only chance to restore the “utopian element” of photography (Benjamin) which (with all its commercial facets as well as ailments) sought, for a swift passing moment in the past, in that early modernist momentum, the grace of its existence as a fair vision, as an idea and a utopia. While displacing and breaking away from the overall historical processes of modernism, which are only valid in the non-site, in the a-topos of the mainstream “art market” and in the concretized non-place of Daum’s photographic hybrid-sites, one may, possibly, reconsider that which had once been proposed, somewhere in the mists of the past and the world exhibition.

—

1. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 150.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part II: 1931-1934, trans. Michael William Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005), p. 507.

3. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Selected Writings, ibid., pp. 35-37.

Shira Zelwer’s installation has two parts. One consists of small-scale sculpture, like a model for an installation: 400 miniature Keter Plastic chairs cast in wax and painted white, whose height was adapted to the scale of Zelwer’s figure sculptures, arranged in rows. The first four rows are marked “reserved,” a category which gave the work its title. Keter Plastic chairs are a popular, inexpensive and washable, mass-produced piece of furniture; a cheap substitute for higher quality chairs. They are suitable for residential apartments and public spaces, for family celebrations or mourning visits, and for mass performances in the city square, such as concerts or commemoration ceremonies. The “reserved” label on the front rows, however, transform Zelwer’s chair array (as happens in reality) into a representation of a class division. Such a slip furnishes the object to which it is attached – and mainly the one intended to occupy it – with added value: these are the best, closest seats denied to the public in favor of the privileged elite.
The second part of the installation is comprised of objects made of wax and acrylic paint, simulating popular Gobelin works in golden frames. Six heavy, ornamented large-scale
(130×130 cm) frames featuring Gobelins of still life: floral arrangements.The still life in Zelwer’s Gobelins is not the still life of luxury and affluence. These are images of simple, standard bouquets of the type sold at the local florist shop on a holiday eve, instructions for whose arrangement – combine lily with carnation, calla lily with gerbera, anemone with rose, and add some decorative greenery – may be found in illustrated manuals which Zelwer keeps. The golden frames that Zelwer duplicates (the model is hung over the piano in her parents’ home), send us to bourgeois Europe in the early 20th century, to the remnants of the grandparents’ family homes. Like the plastic chairs, Zelwer’s Gobelins are an inexpensive popular substitute for the historical oil paintings depicting spectacular flower arrangements associated with European bourgeoisie. Both the simple domestic Gobelins and the flower arrangements are class-related.
In addition to the class issue, both parts of the installation represent absence and death. The empty chairs in art and in popular culture, on the one hand, and the vase with flowers, the still life, the nature morte, on the other, are quintessential symbols of lifelessness. The wax from which they are all made – the material used to make death masks and paint mummy portraits in Fayyum – further reinforces this sense of desistence. Zelwer extracts objects from the margins, elevating them into art by sculpting them in wax which she perceives as a “heartrending, humane, brittle and vulnerable material.”
The Ulpana (seminary) women will soon arrive, and the traveler group, the elder uncle and aunt, the soldiers, the museum docent… Or will they?