Exhibition Opening: July 20 7-11pm
New Regulations Performance: 7-9pm
Music: 9-11pm
Curated by Rebecca Pristoop
Fragile Territories brings together artwork by three Israeli artists of the same generation who explore their complex relationships to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While each artist moved to the United States to pursue her own artistic exploration, it is the home she left behind that beckons her full attention. Individually, the artists wrestle with poetic notions of faith and loss while enacting artistic processes that question the division between personal identity and national responsibility. Together, they represent a growing community of Israeli expats struggling to unpack the meaning and significance of this inheritance. Through diverse materials and processes each artist grapples with the loss of security and rightness within Israel’s national history as it intersects with a thinly veiled private life.
Alexandra Ben-Abba gathers images of military destruction and confrontation from social media outlets. Observing the human relationships captured within, her process results in blown glass, installation, video and performance. For Fragile Territories, Ben-Abba presents the performance “New Regulations,” along with a video entitled, “Always On Our Plate.” These pieces pair experiences and images of security checkpoints and obstruction that seem striking and uncomfortable to an outsider. To an insider, they reveal the banality of politics in everyday Israeli life.
Noa Charuvi refers to photographs from news sources and processes them through paint on canvas. By eliminating almost all figures in her painterly interpretation, she abstracts and distills images to examine disappearance and displacement in a broader context. With deliberate and flat brushstrokes, she manipulates form and color, breaking down specificity of person, place and thing. In this way, her investigation travels from the personal to the universal.
Naomi Safran-Hon takes her own photographs in Wadi Salib, a dilapidated neighborhood in her hometown of Haifa and transforms them into sculptural paintings. She mounts her photographs on canvas and cuts into the images of crumbling structures, removing broken windows and doorways. Layering surface and texture, Safran-Hon rebuilds the fractured constructions with lace and cement, thereby interrupting the silence of her source photographs and giving voice to the untold stories of the now absent inhabitants.
Presenting Fragile Territories in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, another region historically under conflict, inevitably adds an additional layer of import to the investigation. It is also the current home of all three artists. - See more at: http://www.artiscontemporary.org/agenda_detail.php?id=861#sthash.FTRLZ5fk.dpuf
LaunchPad
721 Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn
2,3,4,5,C to Franklin Avenue station
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