Thu 22 June 2017 | 8:00 pm - 11:59 pm
Artport Tel Aviv - Ben Tsvi 55, Tel Aviv, FREE
NonFinito 2017 is not only the ending moment of Artport’s fifth year residency program, it is also the end of an era. It is the last exhibition at Artport’s gallery on 55 Ben Zvi Road. With its conclusion, Artport will leave the compound on the way to its new location, and the whole area will be destroyed as the first step in becoming a new neighborhood in south Tel Aviv.
Artport is first and foremost a residency program, supporting Israeli and international artists in realizing their ideas and art works. But Artport is also a Venue. Before settling in Bezeq’s old containers, we couldn’t foresee the venue’s influence on Artport’s nature, how it will affect the relationships between its residents, or the artworks developing in it. But the site, the venue and the large outdoor common space all have an influence on what occurs inside the studios and the gallery. Artport on 55 Ben Zvi Road is a place of many possibilities. A place where dreams can develop into ideas, where relationships can flourish, a place that invites everyone to feel at home. We can only hope that the same spirit will stay with us in our next home.
NonFinito isn’t a year end show – it is an opportunity to see projects that were created during the residency year. The current show couldn’t disregard the “end”, a notion that was present from an early stage of the residency year, and some of the projects deal with this issue and with the options it entails.
Gabi Kricheli, whose studio was located at the compound five years before joining Artport, builds a room around a tree he carved a year ago. The tree, part of an ongoing project in which Gabi carves trees all around Israel, is destined to be uprooted as part of the planned construction. Can the tree be detached from the place where it was created? What happens to site specific art when the site itself is taken away?
In Light from a Dead Star, Dror Daum deals with the end of an era through images from magazines that were distributed in Israel while growing up in the 80’s, in a time when books and magazine stores were the main connection to the outer world. What happens to the images that were once your fantasy reference when they lose their subjective role and their relevance is re-determined by passing time.
In Dig as High as You Can, Lihi Turjeman creates her own helipad, whose presence is both calming and disturbing at the same time. The letter H can also stand for Help or Home, while its structure, two long rods intersected by a perpendicular line, seems like the horns of the Altar, which in ancient times could serve as an asylum. It continues Lihi’s work with territories, primal forms, signifiers and signified.
Yaara Zach’s new series of objects combines crutches and leather whips into special tools that stand unstable in the gallery. These objects continue Yaara’s research on the intimacy in the encounter of body and object, the fantasy of an action toward a still object and the connection between violence and beauty.
Gili Avissar disrupts his colorful and active studio. The side entrance leads to a dark and apocalyptic space, where figures in costumes attempt to animate the masks and clothes that fill the room, trying to dig up gold from the eternal darkness.
For the last year, Fatma Shannan, has mainly been painting her own body within a carpet. In NonFinito, she examines the body-carpet relationship in her first video works, through a group of teenagers who scatter carpets on the roofs and streets of Julis, as well as through her own body that floats – through spiritual energy, dybbuk or magic – above the carpet she researched at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Closing: July 22nd
Opening Hours:
Thurs: 2pm-8pm
Fri-Sat: 10am-4pm
Check Out The Event Page On Facebook