Artist Diary #13 – Thomas Baldischwyler
7 German days – 7 German postcards
A series of postcards by Thomas Baldischwyler, October / November 2020
Artist Diary #12 – Agnė Juodvalkytė
Slowrise
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity, the natural, the green shade
and the change to black
that appear in these canvases. Something that doesn't
seem to be there
Only i know
i will not speak of sadness here
or having lost a child
In fact i no longer want reminders of what was,
what got wasted
The dense orange air
I have no alphabet for
Photography and video credit: Philippe Gerlach
By Agnė Juodvalkytė, July 2020
Artist Diary #11 – Mara Pollak & Martin Fengel
Le magnétophone ne marche pas (première partie)
This is a fragment from a shared diary to peek into the last hours of the day. While Mara has fun out with her friends, Martin is alone at home, dancing. These starkly parallel events are a part of a persistent state of affairs. Exactly what these two experienced for the rest of the day - alone or with one another - can be seen in a 2-channel video installation at the Goethe-Institut Paris starting next week, which will then be presented online.
Mara Pollak lives and works in Munich. Her photography springs from an intuitive experience of the world. Her work contemplates individuality explored through the absence of the self. What kind of world does one need to live in - socially, politically as well as privately and domestically? Mara Pollak confronts these urgent needs with a lightly humorous gaze, even as the balance in the world tips to the point of collapse. Through the combination of video works, audio pieces and sculptural elements, her photography carefully navigates the relationship between direct observation and the poetry of personal impressions.
Martin Fengel is from Munich, and travels once a week across the Alps by train to Bolzano, where he teaches photography at the University there. He photographs, draws, films, and his collages are immortalised in an U-Bahn station in Munich. His artwork is about beauty and misunderstandings. He attempts to appear in films as little as possible, but for this film he did not succeed.
By Mara Pollak & Martin Fengel, July 2020
Artist Diary #10 – Valinia Svoronou
“The second chapter is over, the end of the story will be revealed on the next eclipse. They were all sat having having drinks in a forgotten place in central Athens. Under the night sky the smog had gone down and after a long time the constellations were finally visible. The night sky was clear as a bright summer day. What’s you sign? Amalia asked. Astronomy was always a way to navigate both worlds: emotional and geographic; A means to figure out the pulls amongst waters, planets and bodies.”
This video features a series of newly made ceramics that I made for a recent duo show with artist Amalia Vekri at PET Projects Athens documented through an AR stargazing app I made this year titled ‘Endymion’. Except for a stargazing tool, the app, is also meant to function as a platform to deploy a story that will take place within celestial events in 2020-21, starting with the penumbral lunar eclipse of 2020; we are now in the end of the second chapter. It is informed by several concepts around the construction of myths surrounding zodiac constellations and their utility as means of navigation across the centuries. The underlying narrative of the app takes the ancient Greek myth and love story of Endymion as a point of departure to explore and dismantle romantic ideas around historical exchanges between the east and the west in relationship to the contemporary world.
My practice aims to explore cultural and technological movements within human history from a perspective of human subjectivity and storytelling.
I works with text, moving image, publications and sculptures to investigate the various metaphors found when known narratives are told by a feminine perspective or when less known narratives are retold, to create a possibilities for the re-imagination of an empowering future or a different past. Further, my work explores histories of immigration, alienation and the cultural exchanges that occur from these movements. I am particularly interested in untold women stories and perspectives and their history within the patriarchal post colonial environment. I am fascinated by the affective tools that have been used in the past such as science fiction, subculture, myths and mystical narratives as modes of a rich representation of these stories which heavily inform my work.
Furthermore, as someone that has grown up in Athens, being part of an immigrant family from Istanbul and Minor Asia, I am very passionate about the history of the exchanges and conflicts between the ‘East’ and ‘West’.
The app "Endymion" is downloadable via App Store and Google Play
By Valinia Svoronou, July 2020
Artist Diary #9 – Katharina Trudzinski
Photography by Florian de Brün
a balance pose – knot – jump
By Katharina Trudzinski, June 2020
Artist Diary #8 – Nat Marcus
Rosary
I was not raised religious, and with a Christian mother and a Jewish father, I inherit neither tradition. All the same, I don't think I can rest on anything but strength of spirit. The past weeks I've been wearing a rosary my mother gave me years ago. It's something to keep myself aligned – not with any god, but rather the great surge of rage and soul issuing from the country in which I was born, and its answers across the world. I treat the incendiary songs of Aimé Césaire and Hildegard von Bingen as similar emblems to touch upon: it's a time for fire. However, it's also a time for mourning. Dominique Fells (Philadelphia, 2020), Oury Jalloh (Dessau, 2005), Tony McDade (Tallahassee, 2020), Said Nessar el Hashemi (Hanau, 2020), Tamir Rice (Cleveland, 2014) – none of these people, nor the countless others known and unknown, should be martyrs. They died, at the hands of police officers and/or right-wing zealots, for no belief or creed other than a will to live. Although the call to abolish or defund the Berlin police force has not reached the same pitch as it did in Minneapolis, it's exceedingly clear that racism is alive and well in Germany's law enforcement. In this time of such hopeful, exhaustive combat, and the labor of grief, and the continuous tremor of anger, it's also been important to simply give oneself over to love. The last poem I wrote during the autumn, dedicating it to Yves and the bond we share. It's this kind of kinship that keeps me fighting and praying.
By Nat Marcus, June 2020
Artist Diary #7 – Michael Salu
Afterlife
Afterlife (working title) is a work I am developing as part of exploring the evolution of language and what we consider to be ‘lived experience’.
In what I like to refer to as a series of translations, I am looking to create intimate narratives through direct translations between image, text and machine—a three-act structure as it were, with the works currently manifesting as a series of triptychs.
In recent years I have been interested in the evolution of language, not just how it became more image-driven, but how it has arguably incrementally developed autonomy beyond our consciousness (or at least awareness).
I often begin work with a photograph I have captured, a record within a moment, which I use to create a written text, sometimes a short story or prose, sometimes poetry. In this Afterlife series, the texts become an intermediary as opposed to the end, moving from the physical capture of the photographed earthly elements to the cerebral textual response and then on into an afterlife of the machine. I have been experimenting with machine learning models, which deploy algorithms to find patterns with the text and then finds ways to represent or respond to that text, as I have also done with the photograph to create the text. I then work with the algorithm in the final composition. So the triptych is both symmetrical and asymmetrical.
As I’m sure many of us have, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death of late and how we respond to it. How our relationship with death and grief differs culturally, but how dominant the western, Christian tradition has become in monopolising that experience. I’ve been exploring ancient ritual traditions in relation to death and also thought about how fortunate I am to have access to another experience of life and death outside of the hegemonic ‘western’ understanding of existence, how the rhythm and relationship with the earth of my ancestral home holds a continuity of voice. There isn’t a before or an after, there just is.
Hegel suggests “every animal discovers a voice in its violent death” and here I wondered if that is what has happened to us, at least symbolically accelerating us into the posthuman moment. In what way does the digital augmentation of language create its understanding beyond the limits of the language we know as language? How will this afterlife we are living manifest, how will the digital world translate, appropriate and re-manifest our grief and the defiant continuation of our spirit?
By Michael Salu, June 2020
Artist Diary #6 – Yves B. Golden
Yves B. Golden is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, DJ and organizer. Her work is inspired by the sacred bond that exists between memory and physical objects.
Her collaborative and solo works have been featured in Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, ICA London, NADA Miami 2019, Yaby Madrid, Springsteen Gallery Baltimore, Caleb Bingham Gallery at University of Missouri and Raw Material Company Senegal.
The image is courtesy of the movement based artist Jerome AB called Untitled (Masculine Ken).
The soundtrack is Peanut by Sonny Sharrock.
By Yves B. Golden, June 2020
Artist Diary #5 – Carolin Eidner
The 30 last seconds of this onion's life
An onion with sprouts (sign of the first steps of rottening) covered in glittering and glimming tape is suspended by a black thread on a lamp and pending from left to right in a dark homy surrounding.
This abandoned vegetable turned into a cripple faces the sensation of transgression from earthy nature, daily and common to the glory of shameless dance in suspension.
This dance, this ritual celebration happens near and in direct contact to the source of light - the lamp creates the colorfull reflections on that poor vegetable, who went through the metamorphosis, even to say "Poesis". Likewise a contemporary dervish dance, which takes place at a shining disco on contrast to the sinister daily surrounding.
By Carolin Eidner, May 2020
Artist Diary #4 – Una Szeemann
a Dream - a Picture - a Day
By Una Szeemann, May 2020
Artist Diary #3 – Martin Chramosta
Tactic and Valley
Nine bars of bronze. Composed and poured from the imprints of sticks, iron, fingers.
The rods are hybrid, raw, flat on the back. They are called Taktik - tactics. They clock the wall.
They are part of a sculptural stratagem for the wall. They are concepts.
The fingers and the sticks and the irons grasped the damp clay in which they were pressed.
The distances are variable. The directions are variable. The bars are fixed. The shapes are rigid.
The bronze shimmers like old gold and the aluminum shines like old silver.
Two reliefs hang with the tactics on the wall. They are two valleys.
They were poured into one big valley, over the vineyards of the Valais.
You can see topographies. Borders. Maybe an eye or even a mouth.
Taktik und Tal
Neun Stäbe aus Bronze. Aus den Abdrücken von Stecken, Eisen, Fingern zusammengesetzt und ausgegossen.
Die Stäbe sind hybrid, roh, flach auf der Rückseite. Sie heissen Taktik. Sie takten die Wand.
Sie sind Teil eines bildhauerischen Strategemas für die Wand.
Sie sind Begriffe. Die Finger und die Stecken und die Eisen begriffen den feuchten Ton, in den man sie drückte.
Die Abstände sind variabel. Die Richtungen sind variabel. Die Stäbe sind fest. die Formen sind starr.
Die Bronze schimmert wie altes Gold und das Aluminium glänzt wie stumpfes Silber.
Zwei Reliefs hängen mit den Taktiken an der Wand. Es sind zwei Täler.
Sie wurden in einem grossen Tal gegossen, über den Rebhängen des Wallis.
Man erkennt Topographien. Grenzen. Vielleicht ein Auge oder auch einen Mund
By Martin Chramosta, May 2020
Artist Diary #2 – Hori Izhaki
The intimacy of the physical sphere /
The intimacy of the digital sphere
In researching intimacy, I had encounters with two artists, one after the other, one in Paris and one in London, each for three days, where we have lived in time and space together. Together, we created a temporary mirror of our encounter.
In Paris I collaborated with the artist Chen Cohen. Intimacy is expressed at the point of meeting. When one body pushes against the other, it casts and defines the space which we are, and which we are in. It holds the pain that accompanies the intimate point.
The other video I created in Corona Times. It is an extract from a performance that is part of a series dealing with air. I was and still am fascinated by air: its connection to its vessels, how vessels define its shape and vice versa, while on the other hand it smears the meeting points and leaks between the vessels.
Air has the amazing ability to transfer not just through physical spaces, but to travel between medias into the digital sphere as well. This plays up the architectural organisation, the air pockets, the spaces, that the digital sphere is.
I find the themes have become even more relevant these days. With restrictions and alternative encounters, space has become both, more dissonant and more fluid.
By Hori Izhaki, May 2020
Artist Diary #1 – Eitan Ben Moshe
Thus far
At the center of the main space of Eitan Ben Moshe’s exhibition, within a functional-looking, rectangular structure, stands a tabletop that looks like a frozen pool or glacier, on which various transparent objects are placed. It is a spectacle reminiscent of a prophecy of ecological devastation, a chemical experiment that has failed and imploded, or a celebration that has gone terribly wrong. We are invited to enter a dim space lit with a magical glow of refracted light and repeated echoes of shadows and reflections.
The sculptures on that surface are hybrid compositions of pieces of items from different fields and time periods: test-tubes for distilling liquids; microscopic structures of ice crystals and minerals from a biology lab; fragments of ware of the sort one might see in a domestic display cabinet, made of glass, polymers, plastic or crystal, some custom-blown and shaped by hand, some ready-made objects, and some 3D-printed; salts and glittering hallucinogenic powders. Above all, however, we can sense a refusal of all of these to submit to a fixed, logical, unified, and organized narrative.
The inner space of the exhibition becomes an alchemical setting that breathes life and beauty into a mechanical butterfly. It is drawn, as though spellbound, to the seductive light, and is trapped and frozen within it, thereby fulfilling its transformative destiny and its tragic, predestined fate. At the end of the structure, hanging side by side in a row, are five large white suits of glossy fabric, a cross between scientist cloaks and ceremonial suits of mysterious ministers of some esoteric spiritual order. The five suits echo the five fingers of the white hand sculpture situated at the end of the space. Is this the hand of the creator? On the hand’s wrist an incomplete pentagon is drawn, crystalline in shape. The signal has been given: this is the Time of the Crystal. Ben Moshe sees crystals as pure accidents that instill order within the chaos of creation. They existed here long before us, and will continue to do so long after we are gone – ad infinitum, or thus far, per the title of the exhibition.
"Thus far" was on view at the Herzliya Museum in 2019, curated by Dr. Aya Lurie.
By Eitan Ben Moshe, April 2020
Artist Diary #13 – Thomas Baldischwyler
7 German days / 7 German postcards
By Thomas Baldischwyler, October / November 2020
Artist Diary #12 – Agnė Juodvalkytė
Slowrise
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity, the natural, the green shade
and the change to black
that appear in these canvases. Something that doesn't
seem to be there
Only i know
i will not speak of sadness here
or having lost a child
In fact i no longer want reminders of what was,
what got wasted
The dense orange air
I have no alphabet for
Photography and video credit:
Philippe Gerlach
By Agnė Juodvalkytė, July 2020
Artist Diary #11 – Mara Pollak & Martin Fengel
Le magnétophone ne marche pas (première partie)
This is a fragment from a shared diary to peek into the last hours of the day. While Mara has fun out with her friends, Martin is alone at home, dancing. These starkly parallel events are a part of a persistent state of affairs. Exactly what these two experienced for the rest of the day - alone or with one another - can be seen in a 2-channel video installation at the Goethe-Institut Paris starting next week, which will then be presented online.
Mara Pollak lives and works in Munich. Her photography springs from an intuitive experience of the world. Her work contemplates individuality explored through the absence of the self. What kind of world does one need to live in - socially, politically as well as privately and domestically? Mara Pollak confronts these urgent needs with a lightly humorous gaze, even as the balance in the world tips to the point of collapse. Through the combination of video works, audio pieces and sculptural elements, her photography carefully navigates the relationship between direct observation and the poetry of personal impressions.
Martin Fengel is from Munich, and travels once a week across the Alps by train to Bolzano, where he teaches photography at the University there. He photographs, draws, films, and his collages are immortalised in an U-Bahn station in Munich. His artwork is about beauty and misunderstandings. He attempts to appear in films as little as possible, but for this film he did not succeed.
By Mara Pollak & Martin Fengel, July 2020
Artist Diary #10 – Valinia Svoronou
“The second chapter is over, the end of the story will be revealed on the next eclipse. They were all sat having having drinks in a forgotten place in central Athens. Under the night sky the smog had gone down and after a long time the constellations were finally visible. The night sky was clear as a bright summer day. What’s you sign? Amalia asked. Astronomy was always a way to navigate both worlds: emotional and geographic; A means to figure out the pulls amongst waters, planets and bodies.”
This video features a series of newly made ceramics that I made for a recent duo show with artist Amalia Vekri at PET Projects Athens documented through an AR stargazing app I made this year titled ‘Endymion’. Except for a stargazing tool, the app, is also meant to function as a platform to deploy a story that will take place within celestial events in 2020-21, starting with the penumbral lunar eclipse of 2020; we are now in the end of the second chapter. It is informed by several concepts around the construction of myths surrounding zodiac constellations and their utility as means of navigation across the centuries. The underlying narrative of the app takes the ancient Greek myth and love story of Endymion as a point of departure to explore and dismantle romantic ideas around historical exchanges between the east and the west in relationship to the contemporary world.
My practice aims to explore cultural and technological movements within human history from a perspective of human subjectivity and storytelling.
I works with text, moving image, publications and sculptures to investigate the various metaphors found when known narratives are told by a feminine perspective or when less known narratives are retold, to create a possibilities for the re-imagination of an empowering future or a different past. Further, my work explores histories of immigration, alienation and the cultural exchanges that occur from these movements. I am particularly interested in untold women stories and perspectives and their history within the patriarchal post colonial environment. I am fascinated by the affective tools that have been used in the past such as science fiction, subculture, myths and mystical narratives as modes of a rich representation of these stories which heavily inform my work. Furthermore, as someone that has grown up in Athens, being part of an immigrant family from Istanbul and Minor Asia, I am very passionate about the history of the exchanges and conflicts between the ‘East’ and ‘West’.
The app "Endymion" is downloadable via App Store and Google Play.
By Valinia Svoronou, July 2020
Artist Diary #9 – Katharina Trudzinski
Photography by Florian de Brün
a balance pose – knot – jump
By Katharina Trudzinski, June 2020
Artist Diary #8 – Nat Marcus
Rosary
I was not raised religious, and with a Christian mother and a Jewish father, I inherit neither tradition. All the same, I don't think I can rest on anything but strength of spirit. The past weeks I've been wearing a rosary my mother gave me years ago. It's something to keep myself aligned – not with any god, but rather the great surge of rage and soul issuing from the country in which I was born, and its answers across the world. I treat the incendiary songs of Aimé Césaire and Hildegard von Bingen as similar emblems to touch upon: it's a time for fire. However, it's also a time for mourning. Dominique Fells (Philadelphia, 2020), Oury Jalloh (Dessau, 2005), Tony McDade (Tallahassee, 2020), Said Nessar el Hashemi (Hanau, 2020), Tamir Rice (Cleveland, 2014) – none of these people, nor the countless others known and unknown, should be martyrs. They died, at the hands of police officers and/or right-wing zealots, for no belief or creed other than a will to live. Although the call to abolish or defund the Berlin police force has not reached the same pitch as it did in Minneapolis, it's exceedingly clear that racism is alive and well in Germany's law enforcement. In this time of such hopeful, exhaustive combat, and the labor of grief, and the continuous tremor of anger, it's also been important to simply give oneself over to love. The last poem I wrote during the autumn, dedicating it to Yves and the bond we share. It's this kind of kinship that keeps me fighting and praying.
By Nat Marcus, June 2020
Artist Diary #7 – Michael Salu
Afterlife
Afterlife (working title) is a work I am developing as part of exploring the evolution of language and what we consider to be ‘lived experience’.
In what I like to refer to as a series of translations, I am looking to create intimate narratives through direct translations between image, text and machine—a three-act structure as it were, with the works currently manifesting as a series of triptychs.
In recent years I have been interested in the evolution of language, not just how it became more image-driven, but how it has arguably incrementally developed autonomy beyond our consciousness (or at least awareness).
I often begin work with a photograph I have captured, a record within a moment, which I use to create a written text, sometimes a short story or prose, sometimes poetry. In this Afterlife series, the texts become an intermediary as opposed to the end, moving from the physical capture of the photographed earthly elements to the cerebral textual response and then on into an afterlife of the machine. I have been experimenting with machine learning models, which deploy algorithms to find patterns with the text and then finds ways to represent or respond to that text, as I have also done with the photograph to create the text. I then work with the algorithm in the final composition. So the triptych is both symmetrical and asymmetrical.
As I’m sure many of us have, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death of late and how we respond to it. How our relationship with death and grief differs culturally, but how dominant the western, Christian tradition has become in monopolising that experience. I’ve been exploring ancient ritual traditions in relation to death and also thought about how fortunate I am to have access to another experience of life and death outside of the hegemonic ‘western’ understanding of existence, how the rhythm and relationship with the earth of my ancestral home holds a continuity of voice. There isn’t a before or an after, there just is.
Hegel suggests “every animal discovers a voice in its violent death” and here I wondered if that is what has happened to us, at least symbolically accelerating us into the posthuman moment. In what way does the digital augmentation of language create its understanding beyond the limits of the language we know as language? How will this afterlife we are living manifest, how will the digital world translate, appropriate and re-manifest our grief and the defiant continuation of our spirit?
By Michael Salu, June 2020
Artist Diary #6 – Yves B. Golden
Yves B. Golden is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, DJ and organizer. Her work is inspired by the sacred bond that exists between memory and physical objects.
Her collaborative and solo works have been featured in Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, ICA London, NADA Miami 2019, Yaby Madrid, Springsteen Gallery Baltimore, Caleb Bingham Gallery at University of Missouri and Raw Material Company Senegal.
The image is courtesy of the movement based artist Jerome AB called Untitled (Masculine Ken).
The soundtrack is Peanut by Sonny Sharrock.
By Yves B. Golden, June 2020
Artist Diary #5 – Carolin Eidner
The last 30 seconds of this onion's life
An onion with sprouts (sign of the first steps of rottening) covered in glittering and glimming tape is suspended by a black thread on a lamp and pending from left to right in a dark homy surrounding.
This abandoned vegetable turned into a cripple faces the sensation of transgression from earthy nature, daily and common to the glory of shameless dance in suspension.
This dance, this ritual celebration happens near and in direct contact to the source of light - the lamp creates the colorfull reflections on that poor vegetable, who went through the metamorphosis, even to say "Poesis". Likewise a contemporary dervish dance, which takes place at a shining disco on contrast to the sinister daily surrounding.
By Carolin Eidner, May 2020
Artist Diary #4 – Una Szeemann
a Dream - a Picture - a Day
By Una Szeemann, May 2020
Artist Diary #3 – Martin Chramosta
Taktik und Tal
Neun Stäbe aus Bronze. Aus den Abdrücken von Stecken, Eisen, Fingern zusammengesetzt und ausgegossen.
Die Stäbe sind hybrid, roh, flach auf der Rückseite. Sie heissen Taktik. Sie takten die Wand.
Sie sind Teil eines bildhauerischen Strategemas für die Wand.
Sie sind Begriffe. Die Finger und die Stecken und die Eisen begriffen den feuchten Ton, in den man sie drückte.
Die Abstände sind variabel. Die Richtungen sind variabel. Die Stäbe sind fest. die Formen sind starr.
Die Bronze schimmert wie altes Gold und das Aluminium glänzt wie stumpfes Silber.
Zwei Reliefs hängen mit den Taktiken an der Wand. Es sind zwei Täler.
Sie wurden in einem grossen Tal gegossen, über den Rebhängen des Wallis.
Man erkennt Topographien. Grenzen. Vielleicht ein Auge oder auch einen Mund.
Nine bars of bronze. Composed and poured from the imprints of sticks, iron, fingers.
The rods are hybrid, raw, flat on the back. They are called Taktik - tactics. They clock the wall.
They are part of a sculptural stratagem for the wall. They are concepts.
The fingers and the sticks and the irons grasped the damp clay in which they were pressed.
The distances are variable. The directions are variable. The bars are fixed. The shapes are rigid.
The bronze shimmers like old gold and the aluminum shines like old silver.
Two reliefs hang with the tactics on the wall. It's two valleys.
They were poured into one big valley, over the vineyards of the Valais.
You can see topographies. Borders. Maybe an eye or even a mouth.
By Martin Chramosta, May 2020
Artist Diary #2 – Hori Izhaki
The intimacy of the physical sphere /
The intimacy of the digital sphere
In researching intimacy, I had encounters with two artists, one after the other, one in Paris and one in London, each for three days, where we have lived in time and space together. Together, we created a temporary mirror of our encounter.
In Paris I collaborated with the artist Chen Cohen. Intimacy is expressed at the point of meeting. When one body pushes against the other, it casts and defines the space which we are, and which we are in. It holds the pain that accompanies the intimate point.
The other video I created in Corona Times. It is an extract from a performance that is part of a series dealing with air. I was and still am fascinated by air: its connection to its vessels, how vessels define its shape and vice versa, while on the other hand it smears the meeting points and leaks between the vessels.
Air has the amazing ability to transfer not just through physical spaces, but to travel between medias into the digital sphere as well. This plays up the architectural organisation, the air pockets, the spaces, that the digital sphere is.
I find the themes have become even more relevant these days. With restrictions and alternative encounters, space has become both, more dissonant and more fluid.
By Hori Izhaki, May 2020
Artist Diary #1 – Eitan Ben Moshe
Thus far
At the center of the main space of Eitan Ben Moshe’s exhibition, within a functional-looking, rectangular structure, stands a tabletop that looks like a frozen pool or glacier, on which various transparent objects are placed. It is a spectacle reminiscent of a prophecy of ecological devastation, a chemical experiment that has failed and imploded, or a celebration that has gone terribly wrong. We are invited to enter a dim space lit with a magical glow of refracted light and repeated echoes of shadows and reflections.
The sculptures on that surface are hybrid compositions of pieces of items from different fields and time periods: test-tubes for distilling liquids; microscopic structures of ice crystals and minerals from a biology lab; fragments of ware of the sort one might see in a domestic display cabinet, made of glass, polymers, plastic or crystal, some custom-blown and shaped by hand, some ready-made objects, and some 3D-printed; salts and glittering hallucinogenic powders. Above all, however, we can sense a refusal of all of these to submit to a fixed, logical, unified, and organized narrative.
The inner space of the exhibition becomes an alchemical setting that breathes life and beauty into a mechanical butterfly. It is drawn, as though spellbound, to the seductive light, and is trapped and frozen within it, thereby fulfilling its transformative destiny and its tragic, predestined fate. At the end of the structure, hanging side by side in a row, are five large white suits of glossy fabric, a cross between scientist cloaks and ceremonial suits of mysterious ministers of some esoteric spiritual order. The five suits echo the five fingers of the white hand sculpture situated at the end of the space. Is this the hand of the creator? On the hand’s wrist an incomplete pentagon is drawn, crystalline in shape. The signal has been given: this is the Time of the Crystal. Ben Moshe sees crystals as pure accidents that instill order within the chaos of creation. They existed here long before us, and will continue to do so long after we are gone – ad infinitum, or thus far, per the title of the exhibition.
"Thus far" was on view at Herzliya Museum, Tel Aviv in 2019 and curated by Dr. Aya Lurie.
By Eitan Ben Moshe, April 2020