Thu 16 January 2020 - Sat 18 January 2020 | 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Neve Sha'anan - Neve Sha'anan, Tel Aviv,
The Night Light Festival will be held for the sixth consecutive year on Thursday and Saturday, January 16th and 18th at night time. The festival is a nightly art and cultural event in the public space on the streets of the historic Neve Sha’anan neighborhood, produced by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, the Southern Community Wing and the Arts Department.
During the festival, the multicultural neighborhood becomes an arena of discourse between the past of southern Tel Aviv and its multicultural present. The name of the festival is derived from the neighborhood’s original urban plan (only half of which was realized) based on the shape of an eight-cane candelabra (‘menorah’), designed by architect Joseph Tischler in 1921.
The public spaces, gardens, street corners, businesses and urban spaces all form a platform for art and light exhibits, ranging from nostalgic statements about the neighborhood’s past to contemplating the complex territory of the present. The event will feature a variety of sculptural installations, live performances, video screenings and local music around winter hot spots.
This year, the Night Light Festival is proud to host the Bat-Sheva Dance Company in a performance piece by Ohad Naharin – On Fein street facing west to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa skyline, time dissolves as the dance company dancers head toward the old Central Station docks.
Festival visitors will also enjoy the local culinary scene that provides culinary experiences of food from around the world brought by the residents of the neighborhood. The Eritrean restaurants serving Injera and vegan delights like Shiro, a stew made of tomatoes, chickpea, onion, garlic and ginger. Fava Beans dish with feta cheese and buttercream Falafel in Sudanic restaurants, traditional Ethiopian food. The Chinese Bao Bar in Neve Sha’anan st. offers authentic Chinese food and the mythical ‘Hamozeg’ bar opposite the former old Central Station which offers beer, hotdogs and local nostalgia.
The Night Light Festival is an initiative of the curators and artistic directors, Yasha Rozov and Ivry Baumgarten, who are bent on exploring and transforming urban spaces through initiated projects in the fields of art and culture. For a decade now, they have been working together in complex and challenging urban spaces.
Every year, the festival hosts a guest curator – this year Nogah Davidson is a guest curator of the festival.
“We invite the audience to stop and contemplate with formidable artists and creators on the complex urban and social questions of this time and place. The festival sheds light on Neve Sha’anan as a liminal space where market forces operate and slowly change the neighborhood’s character. At a time of year when nights are the longest, when light festivals are being celebrated among cultures around the world, southern Tel Aviv becomes the main square of the city, even if it is for a brief moment.”
The event, co-sponsored by Levin Culture, Art and Society and the Theodore residential project; In partnership with Lenny, City Boy, Yuvalim real estate.
Tours along the route of the festival:
Festival art tours, on Thursday, January 9th
19:00 – Children’s Tour
20:00 + 21:00 – Digitel Tours
20:30 – Tour with Art Director
21:30 – Tour with Art Director
Festival art tours, on Saturday, January 11th
19:00 – Children’s Tour
19:30 + 20:30 – Digitel Tours
20:00 – Tour with Art Director
Children’s activities (28 Hagra st) – Saturday, January 18th
4:30 pm – The Train Theater – “Private Collection” – A Collaboration between two artists: Antonio Catalano – a multidisciplinary Italian artist and Jonathan Ben-Haim – Train theater artist in Jerusalem. Stage occurrences that follow the cycle of seasons and life. The children and their parents help a cloud collection take off again with the wind, helping the flowing water continue on it’s way as they sail small boats, waiting for fall leaves to fall, and more. The audience is an active partner and together they create worlds of magic and amusement, of primal experiences and childhood collections.
5:30 pm – Artist’s Workshop with Haiviv Kapzon – During the workshop, children will learn of artists who use light in their creations and create a slide “projector” that operates via a cellular phone’s flashlight. The workshop is 1.5 hours long and is intended for an audience of about 50 parents and children aged 4 and up.
6:30 pm – Elham Rokni— “The Iblis, the Girl, the Sultan, and the Lion’s Tail” Folk tales from Eritrea and Sudan. The stories were recorded and bound to a book by the artist Elham Rokni. The audience is invited to take part, read stories from the collection and share their own folk tales. Afterwards children and adults alike are invited to draw with the artist following the stories they heard.
18:30 – Children’s Tours
Works of art, installation and light
Bat-Sheva Dance Company / Ohad Naharin – Performance – on Fein street facing west to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa skyline, time dissolves as the company dancers head toward the old Central Station docks. Thursday 19:30 + 21:00
The Salon 5 “Invitation to a Circle” A group photo created by members of the salon 5 together with the guests of the festival will be screened on the large wall in the neighborhood in a participatory live photo- performance.
Kuchinate Collective – “We were all refugees” The women of the African Refugee Association, who knit, tell their personal and collective stories. Join an Eritrean coffee ceremony.
Kitchen Talks A social business that creates experiential culinary sessions led by cooks from the multicultural neighborhood communities – “Make your own Injera workshop – guided by Asmai”. Take part in preparing Injera from teff flour, in a traditional dish, with Shirou – an Eritrean stew made from hummus flour.
Clipa Theater – “We Could be Heroes” – a performance of `living sculptures` of biblical characters adorned in contemporary clothing which are in crisis mode – a moment of horror frozen in place.
Asaf Abutbul – “I Don’t Care How You Feel” – sound work – Voices echo the tension between individuals and communities, between the establishment and the people.
Asaf Abutbul – Landscape in the Mist – Video work in which the poet Erez Bitton faces us as an observer who sees what we cannot.
Carmel Barnea Brezner Jones & Avi On Asayag – Plus-Minus – An investigation of the neighborhood’s physical and cultural particularities and how they converse with contemporary questions of identity and place in Israeli culture
Michal Aharoni – “Oblivious White” A building in the International style, which has not been recognized for preservation, is marked by a light outline that accentuates its formal design.
Shahar Afek – “Attic” – a light installation that creates the illusion of an attic room in a distant land where the sky is as blue as ours.
Romie Arden and Hagar Shapira “Encoded Botanics” – Lush vegetation by digital means takes over the historical well house.
Rotem Bidas “Atonement” The transparent women, the sex workers who reside in the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood, look straight back at you with a critical eye.
Ronnie Ben Porat – “Street Jitter” – a cemetery of street signs which brings together the streets of the center and the southern parts of the city.
Vardit Goldner – “Dinner in South Tel Aviv” The personal space in which we toil over dinner is presented in video portraits of preparation and consumption.
David Gibbs – “The Journey” At the end of a flight of stairs going down to a basement, we see signs indicating the presence of a large underground space whose estimated depth remains unknown.
Uri Gershuni – “Reverse” – Images of overturned cars, rotate once more and with them the world around them.
Uri Director – “Video Mask” – Live photography – The audience is invited to wear temporary video masks, exchanging identities and exceeding the limits of self-determination.
Oree Holban – “The Wonderful Journey Inside – A video and installation where the audience is invited to momentarily visit an imaginary world where every boy and girl have a place.
Tamar Hirschfeld— “Madjhoul Beef ” – A vacant store in a yet uninhabited building turns into a slightly strange luxury butcher shop. Saturday 7PM-11PM- performance by the artist inside the butcher shop.
Karolina Halatek – Poland – “Halo” – The circular-shaped immersive installation is designed for a personal experience. An individual viewer has the possibility to discover a new dimension of own presence in the contemplative, pure and abstract environment. Courtesy of the Adam Mickiewicz and the Polish Institute.
Ana Wild – “Techno Fertility / Songs of Possible Futures” -video work- A one woman chorus in versing about the possible futures of technology and fertility.
Dor Zlekha Levy and Ofer Tisser- “The Road to Eri -Installation View” – Documentation and reinstallment of a work from the first Nightlight festival, in which the duo remixed video and audio footage of Eritrean music.
Uri Zamir – The “Museum Keeper” – Sweat trickles down her forehead to the folds of her neck. Her shift begins at the new urban gallery in the neighborhood.
Roni Hajaj— “Good Bet”- installation and live sound performance created as a site specific piece in the public shelter of the Neve Shaanan Community Centre
Shiri Tarko – “Ted” – Installation- A collection of hairstyles adorned by a particular female model is bathed in ultraviolet light, changing any perception of what normality truely is.
Shanit Yehudian, “HUG ME” – A performance in which the artist gives warm hugs to passers by, albeit in the “wrong” part of the city.
Gil Yefman “Schlampe | Decomposition” An underground installation in which the neon word Shlampe (bitch in german) colors a room in yellow and leads the viewer into a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of bodies breaking apart and reconnecting together in an endless loop.
Ayala Landow- “On-a Wire” – An installation of laundry items tells a fantastic tale filled with imaginative riddles about worlds near and far.
Rennais Mazor “Neighborhood Diorama” An installation created at the Hagra 28 community center by elderly denizens of the neighborhood- a dreamy rendition of the neighborhood under a moon lit night.
Michal MacResco “#taptap” Video – Emojis are resurrected and find meaning in stop motion animation on the ludicrous Instagram page Tap_tap_tap stories.
Vered Nissim – “If I Tell You My Life Story, Tears Will Fall From My Eyes” – a video in which the artist’s mother scrubs a sculpture created by her daughter and recounts her bitter and blessed experiences. The single daughter in a wedding dress, the mother in a rag dress. Both of them want to redeem themselves from the clothes they were assigned.
Tal Nissim – “Fein 1” – The most notorious building in Neve Shaanan is seen just before it was demolished and replaced with a lavish new apartment building.
Barak Siman Ov “Grill the Cat” A performance – Neve Shaanan’s wildlife is abundant- to make the most of it, a cat prowls through the streets and offers some neighborhood-made snacks.
Oren Fischer – “Orna the Fortune Teller” – Orna will draw your future in coffee and color, in a one on one session that will connect to your highest state of consciousness
Lali Fruheling- Installation “Forget Me Not” – A car which appears to overheat from within, shatters from its outer shell into space. A cinematic scene set between romantic love scenes and direct punches to the stomach in a battered downtown area filled with prostitution
Vera korman – “Pee Rach / Perach” – Video work -A woman is a flower, A woman is a soft mouth, a woman is a bad mouth, a woman is wild. A woman is the mother of all clichés.
Alona Rodeh – “In Dreams” – video- a tribute to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” – replacing American suburbia with a southern Tel-Aviv.
Elham Rokni— “The Iblis, the Girl, the Sultan, and the Lion’s Tail” —Folk tales from Eritrea and Sudan. The stories were recorded and bound to a book by the artist Elham Rokni. The audience is invited to take part, read stories from the collection and share their own folk tales. Afterwards children and adults alike are invited to draw with the artist following the stories they heard.
Performance times: Thursday 7PM, Saturday 6:30PM
Elham Rokni- “The Seven Abdulkarims”- a video combining fact and fiction. A mixture of fragments from folk tales collected by the artist in conversations with refugees living in Israel along with her experiences during their encounters.
Maayan Rassin – “Premiering Anna Artsy” – a local musician ponders the meaning of her existence in the south side of the city.
Rona Stern – Installation- “Space is a Place” – Ancient pots become a gateway to an unknown destination – welcome to limbo land.
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