No Man's Land

In its modern signification, No Man’s Land is a zone separating between the armies of enemy countries during and after war; an area that conceals more than it reveals – an area without known ownership, which denies a foothold for governing authority, a territory without actual sovereignty or self-control.

The works of the nine artists participating in the exhibition, engage contradictory, undefined situations, suspended between polar opposites: the borderline between art and reality, and the distinctions between artistic categories and techniques; the encounter of collective historical memory with private memory; areas of transition in daily life in which the confidence we draw from the close and the familiar is undermined; situations in which social and political mechanisms of power encourage recklessness and lack of responsibility. They all shed light on this area of transition and lead to a third state – a vulnerable twilight zone; a cognitive state that begins with a dream or fantasy and ends with

self-aware criticism.

The desire to penetrate and probe limits and borders through artistic creation, touch and detach from place and memory, self and other, finds a unique expression in each of the works, nurtured by a yearning for freedom that the social-political reality refuses to accommodate.

Thus, in a particular and important sense, the exhibition No Man’s Land undermines its own etymology. It warns us not to be deluded by its common association with life on the margins of society, with incidents in remote battlefields and semantic fields, or events and terms from the distant past; rather, it asserts the presence of the term and its echoes at the heart of our reality, here and now. 

Additional gallery talk: Sat. 26.7.2014 at 12:00 pm