Current Exhibitions

In an era in which almost every aspect of our lives is mapped, Netta Lieber Sheffer offers her viewers a chaotic map, and in so doing deprives them of the coordinates for navigation and the footholds for linear progress with a beginning, middle, and end. Lieber Sheffer inundates the walls and floor of the space with sheets of canvas painted with soil and charcoal, assembling them into a panoramic installation of a torn, distorted world. The generous gesture, ostensibly inherent in the act of unfolding, which reveals physical or conceptual spaces for all to see, is a mere appearance. In their arbitrary proximity—as if a thread has been stretched, contracting them into a forced neighborhood, whose gaps might be bridged only by the “miracle of Kwisatz Haderach” (a leap of distance)—the images and representations lack causality, rooting in reality, or logical derivation.

“Prestige,” Marcelle Tehila Bitton and Aniam Dery’s exhibition, is constructed as a play for three rooms. Three acts comprising video installations, sculpture, and objects, tie biographical, cultural, and artistic sources of inspiration to form an alternative microcosm where an associative interplay of identities—parodic, grotesque, at times utopian—takes place, striving to dissolve the dichotomy between the poles of religion and art.

Quotes from rabbinic texts, rituals and customs, sermons and tales, beliefs, myths and biographical sources merge with artistic and cultural concepts and criteria, aesthetic codes, gender games, class etiquette, pedigree and affiliation norms, fashion dictates, canons of beauty and prestige, the right virtues, and hierarchical criteria.

Hana Jaeger’s painting moves to the margins of life; it is drawn to the margins, clings to lost moments, which are stuck like life itself, filming them from up close. How we hate the state of waiting, so tired of it. Always in a hurry, it is unclear where to. How low can we go, eyes downcast in the alienated queue in the waiting room, staring at the screen at the end of yet another grueling day of work, lying in bed in anticipation, which is never fulfilled, for an authentic sentiment of love. For Jaeger, we are all anti-heroes; even Superman is bent, tired and lifeless.

The works in the exhibition—all from recent years, some from the COVID19 lockdown periods—drain and flow like a gloomy prophecy into the spring ahead. This period, which was all about awaiting liberation, lingered, and we were trapped in time, inside the room, indoors, in the city, within the country’s narrow borders—all of which became one big, closed and forced waiting room, hanging by a thread.

Exhibition in the 22nd Nidbach series

From “anti-hero” stance, Shir Handelsman construe aesthetic manifestations: meticulous, precise, even ostentatious. They envelop the question of realism or anti-realism and sustain it. Shir’s “aesthetic” is the bacterial environment in which his “anti-hero” can transpire in an eternal object/subject state. This “aesthetic” is the crutch used by Shir; it is the apparatus.

In his works in the exhibition Handelsman introduces a parallel apparatus. The mechanized sculpture Stress Fractures comprises a 200-kg limestone, adorned with five hammers that constantly hack at it. Each hammer hits it once every 10 seconds. The hewing is insignificant, and barely damages the object, but it certainly tries its utmost.

The video piece Who Owns the Sun? Handelsman’s home becomes the scene of action for his entire world: miraculous natural phenomena take place in his living room, bedroom, and bathroom. He harnesses the natural forces deliberately and precisely in the shadow of a pandemic in which solitude and isolation are supposed to ensure our existence.