Nonfinito 2023, the year-end exhibition of Artport’s residency program, marks ten years of activity since the inception of Artport Art Center. A decade of studios for artists from Israel and abroad, of exhibitions and events, books, films, thoughts, and conversations. A decade of support for art and artists.

Exhibition’s curator, Vardit Gross tours: Saturday, November 2nd, 12pm and Friday, December 15th, 12pm.

The current show was conceived in dramatic, stormy days of internal and external disconcert. In a time of uncertainty regarding our place and reality, many of the featured works introduce alternative realms, at times utopian. For the most part, they contain only a fleeting reminder of the human presence that passed through them.

Ira Eduardovna returns to the moment when her parents sold their apartment in Uzbekistan. With the little money they received, they bought prints by a Soviet painter and an antique shotgun, hoping to sell them in Israel and buy themselves a new house. Thirty years later, Eduardovna revisits the items that have never been sold, trying to turn them into marketable art and reobtain their lost value for their own sake and for her parents.

Yael Efrati distills an urban memory from the architectural and human moments that comprise it. A key left for the guests is embedded in the entrance carpet at the end of the ramp leading to an apartment; handprints are seen on the graphite-coated bars, of the children who hung on them; piles of cat food are waiting in the corner for the real owners of these streets.

Chen Cohen explores the possibilities inherent in matter compared to the photography that accompanies it. Alongside a photograph that traces therapeutic movements without a patient, she presents new sculptural works that probe objects and elements surrounding her—a vase, a rack, her own body parts—while emptying them of their power and meaning.

Lee Nevo creates a parasitic cell. It leeches on the gallery walls to make a back space of sorts, which also functions as a confessional, offering a private experience within the public space of the gallery.

Avner Pinchover seeks to convert one form of energy to another, to breach physical and mental boundaries. He throws chairs against a wall, a stone against glass, shoots fluorescent lights at high voltage power lines, pushes the metal shutters of the security room in an unfinished floor, crashes his own body against a plaster wall. The moment of contact is the moment of explosion, and the moment of explosion is a moment of pleasure and transition—from one type of energy to a different one, from heat to light, from motion to fracture.

Hillel Roman built an image-displaying apparatus. The images appear one by one, shining in phosphorous green, like a radar or a night vision device, only to fade away and be replaced by new, brighter images. Like Roman’s charcoal drawings, the flood of AI-generated images conjures up, or maybe dreams, over and over, about a pined for distant destination, a utopian city, which the viewer is either approaching or fleeing.

* The tours will be held in Hebrew