On floors and ceilings, within and behind walls, Lihi Turjeman’s large-scale installations penetrate layers of lime, plaster, geography and history. Through intense labor, digging through walls, mixing materials and transferring layers of paint, she maps territories and reveals layers of personal and public history, at times hidden from the eye. In a constant search for the source, the center and the center of gravity, she documents constant decay, urban, social and human.

On the occasion of “NonFinito”, Lihi Turjeman presents a large-scale installation in the central area of the gallery, occupying both floor and ceiling. Entitled Dig as High as You Can, it consists of a helipad, whose presence is both calming and disturbing. The letter H, which is the sign of the Heilpad, can also stand for Help or for Home, while its structure, two long rods intersected by a perpendicular line, seems like the Altar’s horns that cannot save a soul. Furthermore, the artist mentions the power of elevation, the spiral, from top to bottom and vice versa, suggested by the circular forms associated to the Helipad and by the circle surrounding the H. Interested in the power of signs – street signs, signs of human activity, signs of civilization – the artist speaks about the formal power of the capital letter H surrounded by a circle, but also about the rotating and infinite movement of the helicopter itself.

Feminine yet physically heavy, close to the power of materials yet completely conceptual, the work of Yaara Zach is conceived to make our body react, physically and mentally. The artist often speaks about her oeuvres as generators of performative space between themselves and the viewer, who she sees as an active agent, an actor, rather than a passive spectator. Through the appropriation of very common objects, the artist takes the legacy of Duchamp’s rectified ready made to new and unexpected horizons, letting the materials speak before anything else.

While all her works appear at first as sculptures, a closer look reveals a strong connection to the medium of painting, whose foundations – color and composition – she applies to materials that become her very special palette. Within this discourse, this ode of “painting in the expanded field,” her project for “NonFinito” appears as exceptional, a position – more similar to a zigzag than to a straight line – the artist enjoys. This new body of work takes the belief of artworks as generators of performative space to a new level. Leather whips, crutches and metal extensions are the formative elements of a total-black set of sculptures, open to multiple interpretations: from anthropomorphic silhouettes to medical (or sexual?) tools; from objects ‘disgraced’ from their functions – you can lean on them but they won’t give you stability anymore – to a family of wonderful creations. Bizarre, standing between the floor and the wall, not three-dimensional enough to be sculptures, not bi-dimensional enough to be paintings, these works – all Untitled (2017) – represent a new chapter of Zach’s modus operandi, a unique balance between the familiar and the uncanny.

Most of the inhabitants of Julis, a Druze Village near Acco, have carpets on their floors; this object, beautiful and functional, so common yet so full of mythologies, has been the main instrument serving Fatma Shanan’s explorations of issues such as gender, politics, and representation. Trained as a traditional painter, her works employ the carpet as a leitmotif in order to frame moments of everyday life, which are in fact coded statements about emancipation, definition and freedom – only reached through self imposed discipline and constraint.

The set of strict rules dominating the making of each painting is indeed pivotal for a deep understanding of her practice within the legacy of painting, but also in connection to image making and meta-linguistic positions. Each painting starts with a carefully staged photograph; she then meticulously transfers the image, from the pixels of the digital camera to the “pictorial pixels” obtained by very thick almost-squared paintbrush strokes of oil paint – with no medium or turpentine – on the canvas. Following the language of photorealist painting, this process is almost always facilitated by use of the grid, which guides the artist’s eye and hand in a set of robotic and meditative actions. Within these premises, self-portraiture plays a crucial role, which brings us back to the beginning: a woman in Julis, not cleaning the carpet – like almost all women do – but painting a carpet, which is already a painting in itself; not keeping the carpet “clean” – by walking around it – but stepping on it, going through it, physically and metaphysically. Following this trajectory, Shanan’s new video created for “NonFinito” represents a new point of departure.

Through multimedia, sprawling and colorful installations, Gili Avissar creates parallel worlds, territories of freedom, released from any kind of sublimation. Figures like the child, the clown, the madman and the artist, are all contained in Avissar’s cosmos, which he patches, weaves and sews – at times through fragments, at times through overwhelming experiences – to reality at large. While we can find fragments of his joyful madness in shows by contemporary choreographer Yasmeen Godder, or as flags in Konstanz, we can also find ourselves in this very own “Never Land” while navigating his total installations or hypnotizing videos.

Driven by voyeurism and conceived for his own studio, the artist’s “free territory” par excellence, for NonFinito Avissar created a total work, centered on a closet through which several of his fabric works emerge in order to occupy the whole space. Towering this river of colors and materials of ready-to-wear-but-only-by-the-artist costumes, is a video in which Avissar performs a sort of alter ego – or perhaps his real self? – a character that already appears in previous video works. His work continues a desire to link the notion of magic objects – from Pandora’s box to Aladdin’s lamp, from Mary Poppins’s suitcase, to Alice in Wonderland’s doors – to the body, namely that of the artist. In this surreal scenario, full of bright colors, obsessively repetitive, disgusting and attractive at the same time, we wonder: what is the mission of this histrionic, this joker – this double-sided entertainer? Is he here to entertain us or only himself? Is he funny or scary? These very questions connect this parallel reality to issues that are very present within contemporary society.

Light from a Dead Star is part of a larger research on ending, and specifically on the end of an era, through its collective imagery. Dror Daum crops, enlarges and manipulates cutouts of music magazines from his teenage years, thus examining their significance and relevance to his personal experiences and questioning their place in the cultural domain.Presented in two identical spaces – in his studio and the gallery, this project is a metaphorical double exposure: growing up in Israel in the early 80s, the aforementioned magazines were the only way to get in touch with what was going on elsewhere and to get in touch with yourself, an act of self-definition through style and taste.A double spread of a woman in the sunset turns into a nightmare; cat eyes, originally meant to decorate a children room turn into an intimidating presence on black paper. House objects turn into ongoing signifiers – a yearning to the world outside depicted in a kitchen table that becomes aerial topography; the recognition of the present in a physical death through a paper shredder extracting an image of rock star.What happens with these images and objects when they lose their subjective role, making their relevance valid only as a memory? What remains once their historical and sociological context has changed? Do they become merely nostalgic? What remains from the individual’s experience when it becomes public domain, like the universal grief over a dead icon? Light from a Dead Star is an ode to a moment in time that we see only when it’s over, its light reaching us when it’s too late.

Rooted in the medium of sculpture, Gabi Kricheli’s practice borrows elements from different registers: from craft to carpentry, from outside art to hippy culture. Furthermore, his projects are always charged with a deep level of playfulness while triggering – through subjects such as geography, history and especially archeology – reflections that are openly political. Materials, such as concrete and wood, play a pivotal role in Kricheli’s projects, which can spam from a sculpture as big as a nail or a coin, to massive installations and interventions, such as The Promise Trilogy, displayed in a parking lot in Tel Aviv, consequently destroyed during a fight between soccer fanatics, subsequently reinstalled in the Haifa Museum of Art’s gardens.

In a sort of creative interpretation of Lavoisier’s motto “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed” Kricheli’s new creations always incorporate elements from previous ones, and at times the devoted and attentive viewer will experience the same element appearing and reappearing in several artworks. For “NonFinito”, Kricheli created an artwork around a previous artwork; a few years ago he started to carve patterns and motifs directly on living trees found between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, one of them within the premises of Artport. Kricheli built a narrow wooden corridor that leads to a room built around the tree. In this room, you will be able to experience the carved surface in complete solitude, only accompanied by the clock tower of the nearby Russian church. This presence – made possible by the artist through a window specifically designed for this specific view – brings god and nature together through the hand of the artist.