Out of the Cube
Ventilator X Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Friday, July 16, 2021 - Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Tel Aviv Museum of Art with the support of the
Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Foundation presents
an exhibition throughout the city
Curated and documented by Ventilator - I. S. Kalter
Assistant curators: Naama Bar-Or and Amit Shemma
Participating artists:
Bella Brisel, Tal Engelstein, Freedom Research Institute, Lenny Gaunt, Yonatan Geron, Omer Halperin, Abigail Hopkins, Shahar Kramer, Sigalit Landau, Elad Larom, Amit Levinger, Michal Makaresco, Shir Moran, Efrat Natan, Roman Nefeli, Chaya Ruckin Berkman, Noa Schwartz, Ira Shalit, Shiri Tarko, Maxim Turbo, Ana Wild, Oded Yaacov, Oded Yones
Tel Aviv Museum of Art Website
"Out of the Cube " Mini-Site
Press Release (HE)
Press Release (EN)
Press Release (AR)
Press:
Portfolio Magazine (HE)
Erev Rav (HE)
I. S. Kalter, Zaritzky's Point (Out of the Cube), 2021
Destroyed Curatorial Object
Custom-made bulletin board with used torn posters collected from the city, nineteen 10x15 photos of exhibition locations, fifteen xerox prints of “Out of the Cube” exhibition posters in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
186 x 226 cm
"Deep Marks" is a drawing exhibition featured in the Sculpture Garden of HaYarkon Park and the adjacent Rock Garden. Amit Levinger's gendered drawings are characterized by expressive hatched graphics. The small personal notes in the series "Blood" were made using red pens in his flat between lockdowns, and deal with catastrophic images of bleeding vegetation. Alongside this move, the former-football artist uses a section of grass the size of a football pitch as a substrate for a large-scale drawing that is about to disappear: Levinger draws a huge silhouette of an abstract ghost, using a lawn-mower, leaving deep marks on the surface. The work Ghost / Ameba can be seen in its entirety from the hot-air balloon nearby.
Amit Levinger, Blood, 2021
Pens on paper, mixed media mobiles
30 x 21 cm each
Amit Levinger, Anesthesia and Rebirth / I've Been Waiting for Her, 2021
Sound work, iPod, amplifiers, tent
Variable dimensions, 35 min
Amit Levinger, Ghost / Ameba, 2021
Large-scale drawing made with a lawn-mower
Variable dimensions
Over several hours on Tisha B'Av, as part of the Freedom Research Institute’s Appropriate Documents project, a stall at Independence Hall, independent Declarations of Life were issued to passers-by. Unlike birth records and identity cards that are signed without our consent, each such declaration was written out in colored pens, personally tailored for the individual seeking it, and serves as an authentic identification document for the free human being.
Freedom Research Institute, Declaration of Life, 2021
Performance
The sun may be viewed as an environmental resource that cannot be capitalized. Watching the sun reminds us that all life is essentially equal. Yet, beyond the realms of matter and value, the solar cycle has formed our perception of temporality and the future; it determines our daily reality through pure time measures. The sun, whose existence is temporary, may be considered a planet through which we can imagine, explain and discipline the concept of contemporaneity. The video work To kill the sun, at the sunset three shots, three minutes was made by Chaya Ruckin Brekman in 2008 on the Carmel hills. At the time, the artist sought a vital participation in a moment of creation. She acquired an IDF weapon and drove off to kill the sun at sunset. In the exhibition “Out of the Cube” Ruckin Brekman presents the video in a shop over several days at sunset.
Chaya Ruckin Berkman, To kill the sun, at the sunset, Three shots, Three minutes, 2008
Video, 3 min, loop
Head Sculpture (1973) was Efrat Natan’s first street performance to a chance audience. In many ways, this work was a harbinger of an artistic genre of quiet action in the public space, which was recognized thanks to the remaining photographic images. Such works, that combine body art and minimalist sculpture, are formed in a space that is devoid of institutional artistic context, with the very occurrence often affecting the content of the work. Thus, for example, the title of this work was given by two random tourists who were observing Natan walking along Dizengoff and Frishman Streets, her head stuck in a hollow MDF sculpture in the shape of a cross, or the letter X or a plus sign. One tourist said to the other: “Look! A head sculpture!” For “Out of Cube” Natan reconstructs through a performer that walk which she first made forty years ago.
Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture, 1973/2021
Performed by Nir Vidan
Mixed media
Variable dimensions
In the heart of Yonatan Geron’s flat there is a very red room from which an artificial, neon, burning light is emitted. Upon a quick glance from the communal building’s yard, one might imagine this is a punk squat, a transient autonomous space that exists at the center of a sleepy suburban neighborhood. "Heart Advice״ is an elusive work that is given to life’s own vicissitudes. Therefore, Geron’s living conditions dictate the work’s progress over time. Ascending to his flat, in the fuse box along the staircase, the artist places a small video work, a homage to time-consuming American TV programs. The terrazzo-tiled flat becomes a work of art similar in nature to an assisted readymade. It comprises light fixtures that flash on and off, objects found in the street and carefully selected by the artist, a bookcase and a little table that blocks the hallway, with small Far Eastern souvenirs places on it.
Yonatan Geron, Heart Advice, 2021
Acrylic, felt, halogen
Variable dimensions
Performance by Guy Dubious (Photographed by Ouzi Zur)
Sculptor Abigail Hopkins lives in Hatikva Quarter. Her sculptures are usually made of wood, exhibited on the floor, with qualities reminiscent of furniture. For Candle in the Light she rents an office for a month in a cul-de-sac, stays for a few minutes as a guest in a strange man’s room and leaves the furniture as it is, so that her sculptures blur into the existing space.
Abigail Hopkins, Candle in the Light, 2021
Five sculptures, MDF, industrial paint, hardware
Variable dimensions
For this work, artists Lenny Gaunt and Shahar Kramer rented a shop's display cabinet in Kfar Giladi Street. The dialog that evolves between them is reminiscent of a chess player playing a game against herself. Kramer's video work depicts a figure along an unidentified beach who knocks on a floating door, opens and closes it again and again, and again. Gaunt features a series of papers made of fabric, which she painted on for years and then shredded to make it into a different material, a white surface for a new painting.
Lenny Gaunt, Untitled, 2018
Mixed media on paper
59.4 x 42 cm each
Shahar Kramer, Performance of Failure, 2019
Video, Raspberry Pi
12:00 min loop
The three artists have lived together and as neighbors for many years. Their work merges into their lives. For this exhibition they used an apartment that until recently Shir and Elad shared and is now in the packing, leaving and parting stages of the couple. “Short Term” presents several paintings and sculptures that focus on the neighborhood they live in, not far from Acco Lane—the habitat of the despondent, marginal figures, of sex work, drug dealing and destitution.
Shiri Tarko, The Von Erich Brothers (Square), 2021
Plexiglas, LED
50 x 50 x 30 cm
Elad Larom, Strange Love, 2012
Oil on canvas
199 x 133 cm
Shir Moran, Gate of Mercy, 2012
Lacquer, glass paint and markers on a mirror
180 x 64 cm
In a building on 15 Brener Street, the hairdressing salon Edwards Scissorhands is situated—a local paraphrase of Tim Burton’s movie title. On the floor above, the artist Oded Yonas lives. Yones’ sculpture invades the building’s skeleton from his balcony, a surreal, improvised, intruding, wooden sculpture, alluding to window boxes placed on windowsills or temporary buildings. The sculpture is shaped like a weathervane and sways with the wind. The work is dynamic, enlarged, and refers to the public and private spaces as one unit. A view from the street at Yonas’ work offers a peek into the subconscious of a hidden domestic space, ruled by piracy methods.
Oded Yonas, Meanwhile, 2021
Kinetic sculpture
Mixed media
Variable dimensions
Bella Brisel and Omer Halperin’s paintings express a magic and poetic dimension of a woman’s portrait. Brisel (1929–1982) was an Israel painter who lived with her husband, painter Sioma Baram, in Tel Aviv, Paris and the island of Formentera. They used to exhibit their work together as a couple: her withdrawn figures and his metaphysical landscapes. Briesel was born to an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem and studied painting in Aharon Avni’s school, Studia, under Yehezkel Streichman, Marcel Janco and Avigdor Stematsky. In the 1950s she moved to Paris to study at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in 1955 was awarded the Israeli Painters in Paris Prize. Picasso visited some of her exhibitions, and the influence of Marc Chagall and Amadeo Modigliani is evident in her paintings, characterized by despondent figures. The elongated arms of her female figures encircle their heads like a medallion. Enclosed in a circle, these round heads whose impenetrable gaze is turned inwards, hint at a yearning for other worlds, for heavenly, supreme spheres.
The portraits and spiritual situations depicted in Omer Halperin’s (b. 1984) deceptive pastel and charcoal drawings draw the gaze inwards, like a half-open door through which one can peek at a secret cipher. The material process prominent in Halperin’s work comprises many layers of adding and removing, filling and hiding, which enhance its depth dimension. The compositions are organized well, but each painting is different, delineating for itself a world seeped with bleakness, philosophy and a kind of magic.
Omer Halperin, Carmel, 2021
Pastel on masonite
57 x 57 cm
Bella Brisel, Unknown title, unknown year
Oil on paper
29 x 42 cm
Private collection
Omer Halperin, Envelope, 2021
Pastel on masonite
59 x 56 cm
Near artist Noa Schwartz’ flat, on the roof of an eclectic-style building overlooking Bialik Square, "Vanish Action" is exhibited. A cinematic, dreamy sense emerges from this gentle installation. This is not the first time Schwartz exhibits in locations near her living spaces. Her works usually refer to the architectural environment, to furniture or to useful objects, which she sculpts from organic materials such as sand, twigs or glass; they are intimate by nature, and tend to take place in the public space. "Vanish Action" is made up of two sculptural sections: a dilapidated architectural section is seen from Bialik Square, which the artist added to the eclectic building’s turret as if straightening it, turning it into a cylindrical domed dovecote; upon ascending the staircase to the vacated roof, in a small space reminiscent of ancient laundry rooms, several sculptural works are revealed, devoid of a definite form, small, almost invisible: plasticine sculptures that serve as receptacles for washing liquid the artist has concocted from plants that grow in the square, with limbs reminiscent of body parts. A sense of dampness and murkiness emanates from the sculptures. They merge into the walls like parasites that seem to have occupied the building, which has accumulated electric infrastructures, in slipshod Israeli style.
Noa Schwartz, Roof, 2021
Plaster, plastic, bread crumbs, birds from the neighboring ficus
Variable dimensions
Noa Schwartz, Laundry Room, 2021
Six fragrant wall sculptures made of plasticine, nails, organic washing liquid
Variable dimensions
Oded Yaacov’s paintings are exhibited in the back yard of his Gruzenberg Street studio. In this same street, in another back yard, Yitzhak Danziger sculpted Nimrod in the late 1930s. Nimrod was made from a stone fragment of a previous sculpture of Danziger, which had been destroyed by a religious fanatic—some this are destined to disappear. “Where Did the Kids Go?” presents an intuitive installation at varying times of a different group of paintings daily. The paintings, of varying dimensions, seem to have been abandoned in the yard, like the works of artists left in street corners after they have died. Some of the paintings feature handcuffed Palestinian youths, others present political posters with ideological messages. Yaacov’s painting is direct, piercing, and is usually painted from current-affair photographs or news sites. This is painting that makes a clear stance, based on narratives of freedom, attesting to the iniquities that forever linger in society.
Oded Yaacov, Student, 2021
Oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm
Oded Yaacov, Students, 2021
Oil on canvas
90 x 120 cm
Oded Yaacov, Untitled, 2021
Mixed media on canvas
130 x 97 cm
Oded Yaacov, Untitled, 2021
Mixed media on canvas
120 x 90 cm
A stream of text messages is sent from a pirate cellular antenna – that is wired to a red parking car – to the cell phones of random passers-by in Levinsky Market. Every few seconds they receive a text message that turns up on their screen. The messages, whose context is intimate, are seemingly sent from an acquaintance, but it might be a wrong number. This is not an election campaign communication but a fictional script written by the artist and sent to unknown recipients. The script rolls out a sequence of messages from a woman in distress who lives somewhere near the market. She is isolated, asking for groceries and emotional support – her life needs saving.
Tal Engelstein, Needs to Save My Life, 2021
Car, anthena, cellular data hacking algorithm
Variable dimensions
Beyond the Orange Pipe is Shalit’s third solo exhibition within the Ventilator travelling exhibition space. His two previous exhibitions took place in the studio adjacent to his flat and featured a DIY practice that shifted between digital drawing, works of organic materialism and structural installations made from ready-mades. In Park Hahurshot (Hebrew for Park of Groves), where Shalit takes his daily morning walks, he presents two new series. Thoughts about childhood, youth, education, asceticism and improvisation hover above Shalit’s work.
Beyond the Orange Pipe uses the logical order of the park, in which the trees become the architectural elements demarcating the groves. In between, invisible walls seem to stretch. Using loose wire, Shalit hung on the trees digital drawings that he printed on Dibond. This is private signposting within the public sphere, which announces no specific logic but rather total freedom of action. The viewer surrounds the tree, looks at it, through it, and reality is revealed to her senses. Every once in a while, the church bells ring, a physical sensation of walking on pine needles that fell in the grove is heightened, and from afar the sound of birds tweeting or car horns blaring is heard. At the foot of the trees, improvised chairs that Shalit found throughout south Tel Aviv are tied. He glued them together, rearranged them, paired them and made each chair into a hybrid creature. They can be viewed as rickety sculptures, which cannot be extricated from the street, even if they offer momentary respite.
Ira Shalit, Pockets, 2021
Ten seats of chairs, mixed media
Variable dimensions
Ira Shalit, Wandering, Dial:Beans, Coucou, Spaghetti, Noodle Pie, Tik Tak Kit Kat, Named After, Walt, Pay Pal, Drop The Potato, Weeds, Garden Bed, Midnight, Nocturne, Starlet In The Sky, 2021
Fifteen digital drawings UV printed on Aluminum
27 x 19.5 cm each
In 2007, on the exterior wall of a flat on Salameh Road corner of Har Zion Boulevard, Sigalit Landau painted an image of a black sun around a window, using acrylic paint and a roller. The image, created for the video work Salame, looks like soot residue from a fire or a cry for help from a man trapped indoors. Since then, Landau’s mural, which has faded over the years, reminds those in the know of that famous image from the video work Salame and its accompanying stills. For “Out of Cube” Landau defines, in hindsight, the act of signaling as an autonomous work of art made in the public sphere, dating it 2007–2021. Therefore, inspired by the lockdowns, the isolation and the social distancing, Landau has renamed the work ״Anybody Home?״.
Sigalit Landau, Anybody Home?, 2007 - 2021
Acrylic
Variable dimensions
Roman Nefeli’s body sculpture by choreography is presented in a deserted plot by the seaside and starts with a backstage scene of some show. In this work, an apocalyptic future is merged with rave culture in deserted architecture into a symbolism of anger, violence, motion and continuity. The human physical condition that Nefeli examines in Ostin brings together the figure of the performer and the real person behind it. These layers are deconstructed, built, and demolished again. Familiar systems of representation, such as the image of a hunter or the image of the Olympic chariot, fade in the body into geometrical images: a circle, a line, a rift.
Roman Nefeli, Ostin, 2021
Performance, sound
60 min
Ana Wild grew up in the Opera House, where her father worked, and where she also worked, during several periods in her life. As a child, she used to hang around the Righteous among Nations Square; her work "The One Gone Astray", presented there, is influenced by Verdi’s opera. Whereas in opera the voice, sound, scenery and costumes all take up much of the viewers’ attention, in Wild’s La Traviata three friends in their 30s are seen sitting on one of the granulite benches in the Square, humming quietly, a composition for three voices buzzing in the open air.
Ana Wild, The One Gone Astray, 2021
Performance
180 min
Over the past decade, Maxim Turbo performed in clubs and exhibitions, becoming famous in the Noise Scene of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His stage show is an expressive, physical and emotional act performed by the artist with mixer, tape, pedals, vocals and trumpet. The performance "Man Full of Sins" takes place in Atarim Square, designed by Yaakov Rechter and inaugurated in 1975. It combines original items with covers of folk songs, brings together local Jewish contents with global esoterica, and is influenced by the melodies that poured out of synagogue windows in the Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem, where Maxim Turbo grew up during the 1990s, an era of many suicide attacks. Turbo’s work participates in an alternative movement of cultural and queer trends that take place alongside mainstream art. His research is performative, musical, spontaneous, methodical and formed through improvised practice in real time in the presence of an audience.
Maxim Turbo, Man Full of Sins, 2021
Performance
30 min