The Bureau of Authentication is a joint project of the artists Michal Baror and Patrick Hough, both of whom explore hidden systems of power that lie in the transformation of objects from their sensory state into carriers of knowledge. In their performance, the artists reviewed objects that were presented to them by the visitors, while examining their physical and narrative components. The Bureau issued an original and elegant authentication certificate for each object, based on its examination and the story provided by the participant. The performance piece was conceived in the wake of conversations with antique dealers in the Old City of Jerusalem, who make sure to mention that their shop is approved by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and every purchased item receives an authentication certificate allowing it to be taken out of the country. In this performative act, the artists, who are accustomed to providing authentication certificates for their own artworks, question the idea of authenticity from a conceptual perspective: who can authenticate an object? What is the relation between the object, its story, and the bureaucracy surrounding it? Which objects are worthy of authentication and which exist without it?Alongside the performance, the artists also created a series of video works that explore the question of truth and the historical story of the archaeological site Masada.

A gym mat made of carefully cut and reassembled Venetian blinds; a carpet whose pattern is created by a multitude of metal staples individually applied by the artist with a manual stapler; a curtain consisting of tightly arranged metal clips; these are only some of the conceptually-artisanal and time-consuming tasks Naama Arad gives herself in order to create her unique works of art. At the same time, the results of these tasks never immediately show the amount of energy that the artist invested in their making; quite the opposite, they are presented with a degree of nonchalance and carelessness that is deeply organic to Arad’s position as an artist. This contradictory position—the artist as a laborious maker of objects empty of any functional, social, or aesthetic value—becomes even more acute when the result carries like it often does in Arad’s work, a monumental and architectural tone.In her new body of work, all these issues are still present, but at the same time, they coexist with a new desire to ‘humanize’ living and nonliving forms. Deeply aligned with the current discourse within contemporary culture—which links artificial intelligence to animism—and yet completely disconnected, Arad’s recent oeuvres can be defined as “anatomical détournement”; through these actions a metal dustpan is turned into a female foot; a cactus plant and two Hookah pipes appear before us in their true phallic shapes. Often constructed through a symbiotic relationship—the clay and the metal, the cactus and the pipes—this new body of work is driven by a unique position that stands between the psychoanalyst and the bricoleur, the artistic and the childish, the apathetic and the emotional.

Grotesque, obsessive, bulimic—Elad Rosen’s paintings embody key elements of contemporary society through the employment of the most ancient and “charged” of all artistic media. Informed by satirical drawings, illustrations—his works are often accompanied by short statements, and by the immense history of painting, Rosen’s oeuvres appear unique and honest and at the same time echo figures from the remote and recent history of painting: from Hieronymus Bosch, with whom he shares the attraction for the “catastrophe” (eschatological for Bosh, mundane for Rosen), to Philip Guston’s corky and thick characters. His ultimate honesty, sincerity, and vulnerability often emerge under the sarcastic appearance of his work. The recurring elements in his works—strawberries, bananas, skulls, amputated organs, long nosed figures, blood, and tears—stretch the impossible connections between bitter and sweet, challenge good taste, and push the viewer to the edge of his physical and mental capacity.

Through the medium of photography, David Adika carefully borrows elements from the fields of fashion, advertising, art history, and underground culture in order to create images that are local and at the same time awkwardly universal. The works often carry a strong yet subtle autobiographical touch, as well as a unique interpretation of a specific lifestyle that is traditional to the region and defined by the artist as a “Middle Eastern joie de vivre”. If many of his lush images, often strikingly seductive if not disturbingly erotic, follow the aforementioned path, the artist is always aware of new avenues for his work, especially when working on commission. His last series Table Studies (2016)—created upon the invitation of Giorgio Morandi’s Museum in Bologna, Italy—especially encapsulates his desire to challenge his position as artist, photographer, and image maker; continuing his long-time fascination with the still live genre. Here Adika decided to be guided by the unique palette used by Morandi in his paintings, now symbols of the suspended time still dominating our complex reality, a reality of which Adika, from a completely different position, is definitely aware. Similarly, his upcoming photographic series, focused on the notion of ornament and décor as a metaphor for complex identity issues, will feature Israeli craft objects created in the 1960s and 1970s. These items—mostly ceramics manufactured by Bet HaYotzer, Pal Ceramics, and Lapid— are easily recognizable for their colorful patterns, their iconic textures and, last but not least, for their use of African decorative motifs. Adding a new layer to these tactile objects, in his upcoming photo series, Adika is using photographic print on silk, linking this experiment to his long investigation of objects related to the notion of domesticity. Furthermore, through the act of intertwining the materials of the objects photographed with the materials on which the photographs are printed, Adika brings his interest in the identity and definition of aesthetic means to new and exciting horizons.

Hilla Toony Navok’s work focuses on deciphering the abstract-formalistic origins and aesthetic codes of everyday surroundings: public spaces, domestic mass-produced home-décor, and everyday commodities. By doing so her works uncover the fantasies and promises concealed within the concept of “design”.

Through her sculptures, installations, drawings and videos, Hilla Toony Navok “dances on a color palette.” This dada-like definition perfectly embodies her attention to formalism, a formalism that is obsessively pursued both with color juxtapositions and with the choice of specific materials (palette); at the same time, it (the dance) also underlines her interest in performance, which mostly remains under the skin of her works, surfacing only rarely in her video and kinetic works.

Any painter will agree that a palette is a painting tool and at the same time a sculptural object; in her ‘three-dimensional paintings’, Navok takes poor and cheap materials such as sponges, Formica, wires, document folders, and plastic objects of various kinds in order to conceive colorful display-like arrangements that are fragile and at the same time massive; clumsy and yet monumental; painterly but always part of the history of sculpture. However, her position as “performative colorist” doesn’t distract her from the political implications related to her work; perfectly summarizing this lack of distraction is her recent body of work, a series of environments that emphasize the exclusion of human beings (a recurring theme in her work) through the presence of office-like semi-ready made kinetic sculptures – an apocalyptic take on today’s state of the notion of labor.

“It is expected that scheduled appointments will not be kept or will be kept late. There is no need to moan about this or cause tension surrounding it, since it is the custom of Arab society.”

From “The Rules of Conduct in the Arab world and in Arab Society,” Rafi Siton, 1998, On the Occasion of Israel’s Jubilee

The perceptions of the Orient and the ways that a factual foundation can be turned into a stereotype stand at the center of Tamir Zadok’s piece, which follows the story of Shlomo Cohen Abarbanel. Abarbanel, who would later become a high ranking official in the Israeli Mossad, went on a mission in Egypt in the guise of a French painter named Charles Duval, held a solo exhibition in the National Museum in Cairo and sold to of his paintings to the museum.

The story of Abarbanel serves Tamir Zadok as a platform to a dual discussion on the notion of impersonation, which carries a personal interest for him: impersonating an artist and impersonating an Arab.

Zadok exhibits excerpts from the project that will be completed in the upcoming year. Like any attempt at reconstruction based on half-truths, fiction, and personal additions, the fragmented narrative of the project is also based on available tactics of documentation, staged photography, and readymade.