2023, hand sewn plastic coated inkjet prints, mixed media.

Yinon Avior’s photography distorts and alters the images he captures: he crops, cuts, sutures, and laminates his images to create a made–up, makeshift work of art, queer in its nature and its interpretations. In Still Standing: Dancing Queen Denmark, Avior has taken hundreds of images of bikers coming to a momentary halt, extending one foot to balance on the pavement. Pictured from ground level, behind the bikers, he focuses on this moment of tension, in which one seeks to find solid ground but is simultaneously preparing to depart—an allegory for the uncertainty of the migratory experience. The sewn–together images create a quilt–like aesthetic in an immersive installation, whose goal is not to be contained by a single wall but to “spread”, with all its connotations related to virality and queer history. Avior creates a link between the experience of migration and queer aesthetics, commenting on the ambiguity that accompanies departure and the efforts required to put oneself together again after a traumatic event.

The work was produced

with the assistance of the Danish Arts Foundation.

2023, Hand–drawn animation, wooden bench, sound piece, 68.3 x 70 cm.

Faina Georgiesh Feigin and Noga Or–Yam, founding members of the BUSH Collective which promotes queer feminist art, are frequent collaborators. Together they create interventions inspired by specific sites, drawing out historical idiosyncrasies via the medium
of animation. Valley of Peace is the result of in–depth research into that Israeli nature reserve that has been
a subject of a relentless ongoing municipal battle, as well as the prophesied location for the war of Gog and Magog, the imagined beginning of the end of times. Made up of images taken from archival research, Feigin
and Or–Yam create a hand–drawn animation, layers of paint brushed on top of found materials that echo the
process of archeological excavation. Viewers are invited to watch the projected animation from a wooden bench, made for the gallery, evoking the precarious nature of the valley. The work is an ecofeminist engagement with the history, present, and future of the site: focusing on the relationship between land ownership and natural
destruction, and how messianic fantasies serve as an ordering factor in their formation. Through their practice of reinterpretation, Valley of Peace troubles and blurs notions of authority and possession in favor of presentation and interrogation of the multiple, contradictory perspectives around the spaces we share.

Visual effects: Hanan Offner
Original score: Oded Geizhals
Video editing: Shir Newman
Voice: Einat Aronstein

2023, ceramic figures and photo–transfers.

laying with the tension between the presentation of the self and notions of truth, photographer Dana Weingart’s work often features images of pinup models, family members, and self–portraits, manipulated to create matrilineages which are simultaneously archival and phantasmic. In Ancestral Shrine, she fuses her photographic experiments with the medium of ceramics: using photo–transfers, she imprints a personal archive of images—of the women in her Turkish family prior to their migration to Israel, alongside magazine glamor shots and edited selfies—onto clay vessels adapted from the natural, mythical shapes of sacred prehistoric architectures. The grainy reproductions make the assortment of images unify, emerging as a communal assembly of forms and a makeshift familiar structure. The images, themselves blurred, take part in a maneuver of historical blurring that questions the inherent sanctity o;f the traditional family through the adoption of a queer–feminist aesthetic and ethic that refuses the privileging of the biological.

Plaster, LED lights, 500 x 140 cm

Galvanized tin sheets (Iskoorit), wood
250 x 400 cm.

Multimedia artist Oded Yones’s site–specific works, two of which are featured in the exhibition, respond to his surroundings by constructing surreal environments that engage with myth and fantasy. To Infinity (and Beyond) blocks the entrance, breaking the straight line of entry to which we are so accustomed by demanding that viewers follow a narrow path before entering the gallery. The galvanized tin walls, usually found in construction sites, signify a work in perpetual progress, making the façade into the piece itself. In Moonwalk, Yones responds to an existing architectural flaw created over the years in the Artport building—a set of stairs leading nowhere, located in a hidden enclave of the gallery. He constructs a wall, and carves a door passage and a moon cutout in it, revealing the emanations of bright spotlights behind them. The passage, blocked with plaster rods, allows one to look inside but not pass through: a passage which in itself is futile as it leads to a dead end. Yones’s absurdist aesthetic is inflected by a queer approach that forms a barrier between the viewer and nowhere, questioning the logic of mobility and drawing attention to the excesses of the capitalist values of productivity and efficiency in our everyday lives. In its impasse, Moonwalk is an artificial, unapproachable beauty and an invitation to be led astray.

The project was produced with the assistance of the Yehoshua Rabinovich Tel Aviv Foundation for the Arts

23 – 2022, embroidery, size varies.

Shir Cohen creates loom–woven tapestries that function as queer readings of various historical and cultural folktales. The Operated Jew, a series of narrative tapestry vignettes in various sizes, is inspired by Oskar Panizza’s satirical novel of the same name from 1893. The story follows Itzig Faitel Stern, a Jewish medical student who vehemently tries to change his Jewish ways, manners, and bodily appearance in order to assimilate and become accepted by German society. As the tale progresses, Stern goes through medical and psychological changes—changing his voice, dialect, skin, and even blood. When he is finally found worthy of marrying an Aryan woman, he breaks down and physically falls apart. Cohen’s choice of malleable material and erratic colors for the woven pieces draws a connecting thread between this antisemitic artifact and the violent discourse surrounding transgender bodies today. Cohen doesn’t attempt to moralize Panizza’s story, but rather reinterprets the work through a trans lens, focusing on the overburdened site of transformation that is physical operation. A queer contribution to the contested histories of Jewish masculinity and its manifestations today, The Operated Jew centers on feelings of dehiscence, mismatch, and alienation—frequent leitmotifs in stories of transformation and acceptance.

2023, קpoxy mold, steel bike–rack, video installation, 138 x 84 x 24 cm.

Regev Amrani interrogates the relation between ideologies of masculinity, property, and public space through a sculptural installation. A stolen piece of public property, a rainbow–shaped bike rack is manipulated to look as though it has been ripped from the ground, floating curiously, slightly elevated above ground. Behind it hangs a rotated TV screen displaying an image of a phone in its center, and on the phone’s screen is the Berlin metro—U–bahn—logo in the form of the letter U, set on fire and engulfed by flames, burning in a continuous loop. U plays with the shape of the letter as it appears in both objects in reverse, as well as with its sound, hailing audience members by pointing at “you”. He suspends the burnt phone midair, immersing it in resin within an empty street sign which displays the defunct item as a warning. Amrani indicates the tension between the public and the private, between repurposed and dysfunctional, by exploiting the dichotomous meanings of the objects he employs.

2023, Optical fibers, light sensors, sound sensors, 180 x 100 x 100 cm.

Lacemaker Layla Klinger infuses this ancient art practice with the use of new technological materials, here optical fibers, pushing the boundaries of what lace might be or become. Klinger focuses on the etymological roots of lace, takhara in Hebrew, which derives from the word meaning “hole” (khor) redefining this artform by positioning that which is absent as materially essential. The work Khalal invites one viewer at a time to enter a completely dark space, where s/he encounters a large, woven flower, hung in mid–air. The lacey blossom is made of optical fibers that light up in various programmed sequences, setting off sound sensors that react to light exposure, creating ambient, immersive music. As one is enclosed in the space and enveloped inside the flower, they are invited to touch and play, queering the boundary between subject and object. Khalal translates as both “space” and “fallen soldier”, thus inviting an ambiguous reading of meaning, as both the feminine association with the floral and a masculine, militaristic understanding of spatiality and presence are intertwined.

Sound: Sa’ar Rose