Arieli Dana
Closer than they Appear: Givat Ram
Curator: Caine Ariel
Opening: Saturday, 27 April 2013
Closing: Saturday, 15 June 2013
Gallery talk: Saturday, 25 May 2013 12:00
Between 2010 and 2013, Dana Arieli visited Givat-Ram as a photographer. She was no stranger to the campus, having studied and worked there for over 20 years. The “photographic study” which ensued displayed Givat-Ram in a different light, revealing the many concealed aspects in this supposedly accessible, and even habitual, garden-campus.
From the National Natural History Collection, to the library halls, the gardens and the campus rooftops, she encountered a once-familiar environment made as if to commemorate the inherent tension between essence and appearance.
Inaugurated in 1958, the campus was situated near the gateway to the capital, at a safe distance from the troubled eastern side of the city where Mount Scopus stood. Clearly, it was modeled after the Garden City movement, while it also incorporated flat ‘International Style’ buildings, garden walkways and greenery. It was in great variance with the improvised solution of the time: the transitory buildings scattered throughout the city and the National Library in the Terra-Santa building on the edge of Rehavia.
Each campus maintains a unique rhythm detaching it from its surroundings. Situated on the edge of the “National Quarter”, built on the ruins of the Arab village Sheikh Badr, maintaining its detachment was and still is a difficult task: both physically and politically.
The photographs in this exhibition present a first-ever attempt to visually contend with the totality of the Hebrew University on Givat-Ram. While giving form to its fundamental conflicts, they reveal different compositions, still allowing us to view them not only as negative spaces but as manifestations of a constructive reality.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, with essays by Ariel Caine, Eyal Chowers, Naomi Meiri-Dann, Miki Kratsman, Ezri Tarazi
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Professor Dana Arieli serves as the dean of the faculty of design at H.I.T. Holon Institute of Technology. She is an associate professor in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Between 2004 and 2010 she served as the head of the History and Theory Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Arieli studies the interrelations between Art and Politics in both totalitarian and democratic political systems. She have completed her Ph.d. at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and studied Photography in Camera Obscura and in Bazalel.
Arieli has written numerous articles and books. Among the books that she has published are:
Scared Stiff: Terror and its visualization in art and popular culture, with Dafna Sering (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2011, Hebrew); Creators and Dictators: Avantgarde and Mobilized Art in Totalitarian Regimes (Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press, 2008, Hebrew); Creators in Overburden: Rabin Assassination, Art and Politics (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press and Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, 2005, Hebrew, Winner of Prime-Minister award of the state of Israel, 2006; Romanticism of Steel: Art and Politics in Germany (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1999, Hebrew); In the Labyrinth of Legitimacy: Referenda in Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad and the Israel Democracy Institute, 1993, Hebrew).
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Gallery Talk With Dana Arieli
Gallery talk with the artist Dana Arieli and the curator Ariel Caine about the exhibition “Closer than they Appear: Givat Ram”
Saturday 25.5.2013 at 12:00 pm
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This exhibition is accompanied by aCatalogue