Still image from High Voltage

Avner Pinchover often hurls things in his works—he slams chairs at a wall, throws a stone at a glass pane, shoots fluorescent lights at high voltage power lines, 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 form of energy to a different one, from heat to light, from motion to fracture.

In Panic Room Window potential energy is stored and released, time and again. Pinchover, an architect by training, studies the building, and works on the mezzanine, which was designed for the Artport Gallery, but never built. He reinstates a pair of panic room window shutters, which were installed at an absurd height of 3.50 m, and were never opened or used. He pushes them open, and then closes; breathing with them, then letting go.

He tries to break out of the elevated panic room, which protects no one, using a high-pressure lifting bag. Capable of elevating heavy concrete slabs, it is normally used by the Home Front Command for rescue missions. In a movement imitating inhaling and exhaling, this time it pushes open the metal doors. The energy attempting to break out of the building and flood its surroundings is met with forces that seek to push it back in. Like a cuckoo clock or a church bell, which announces its presence at fixed times, like a smoke or fire alarm, or warning bells against an impending disaster, Pinchover’s shutters constantly open and close, persistently reminding us of the existence of additional spaces which we overlook, and additional dangers to which we are unaware.

In collaboration with Nitzan Yulzari

Videography: Chana Anushik Manhaimer

Image from the artist’s book How Do You Short Circuit Control? East Wing, Left Lobe, and Middle of the Road

Lee Nevo’s works are constructed by layers—image on image, copied and duplicated elements, a visual language that continues from one exhibition to the next and is constantly reconfigured in a different manner. She constructs abstract and tangible systems, exposing a subversive potential embedded in them.The sculpted elements hint at events that have occurred or are about to unfold, part of an array of decisive evidence, complex proofs, words that have become sentences, devoid of a defined beginning or end.

Nevo’s spaces invite the viewer to follow the existing links within them, including a tangle of internal connections and alternative narratives. Composed as a set of personal observations, her image index is drawn from existing appropriations from everyday life, the internet, cinema, religious rituals, prison cells, and temporary offices. She deconstructs architectural structures into their constituent elements, using the resulting gap between their functionality and the potential load they carry, between the secular and the ritualistic, to generate alternative possibilities and lend them added meaning. The connections give way to chaos, and from it, a new place is formed; a place that is mostly familiar yet alienated, at times amusing and often threatening.

J.U.I.C.E.S is an ad hoc attempt to assemble an environment, fusing fragments and marks extracted from the body of work created by Nevo in the past year, an array which is recomposed as a whole.

Nevo built a parasitic cell, which leeches on the gallery walls, creating a sort of backspace. This chamber was created following a confessional booth, and appears as though it was intended for one person at a time. The corridor on its other side is a closed passage, suggesting the possible existence of another place that is neither here nor now.

Chen Cohen’s archive of movements is challenging: on the one hand, upright standing, on the other—surrender and total collapse. It also spans many therapeutic gestures, most of them drawn from treatments that she herself has received and is receiving from doctors, nurses, and friends. In the works presented in “Nonfinito,” Cohen removes her slender body from the photographic frame where it usually dwells, asking other people and objects to act in her place, to move according to the movements in her archive. The material treatment she usually applies to her photographic works, is now applied to the materials themselves.

We can only imagine what the three women staged in the photograph Pulse are holding. They are bending sideways, their hands outstretched. Are they trying to grab hold of the artist? Their movements are gentle, promising support, but in reality they hold nothing.

The long, narrow rod, the lower part of a bracket—an L-shaped support for hanging shelves—likewise supports nothing. It is as though Cohen’s presence is embedded within it. Having stretched to a height of 1.70 meters, like the height of the artist’s mother, it seems to be seeking a new meaning, perhaps as an alternative, straight and stable spine.

The curvy plaster jug was created in a long process of studying a material, in which Cohen experimented in the last year. It was constructed from materials that are also used for treatment and healing—gauze and plaster. The jug is associated with young women, such as the biblical Rebecca who offers water from the jug at the well, or Vermeer’s milkmaid. Its round shape resembles a womb; it envelops a space and holds change in it. Cohen, however, pours its content, and subsequently photographs the interior of the jug; that which is present in it, or possibly absent from it. The jug, whose symbolism as a link between the human and the transcendent crosses cultures (from burial rituals, through wine celebrations, to the local oil jar) thus loses its power to hold and contain, and the void becomes the essence. The load we imagine, whether inside the jug, between the outstretched hands, on the back of the shelf bracket, or on our own back, is the baggage we carry; visible or hidden, alone or with the help of others.

Yael Efrati roams the city streets, collecting objects and views, habits and mistakes, balconies and railings. She captures moments, episodes, and perspectives, ranging from a private memory to the ongoing life of a city.

Evening. Cats cross the street, looking for the piles of food left for them on street corners and at the entrance to the neighborhood park. Under a doormat at the entrance to an apartment lies a key left for the guests; bars surrender the handprints of the children who hung on them. A walking stick and a handrail fuse to form one supporting body. The imprints left by people and animals are formed, deconstructed, and reconstructed on a human scale, life size. They are introduced into the gallery with a new materiality: the bars are made of clay; the garage door is covered in car paint.

Efrati lingers and dwells on urban moments, fusing the architectural and the human, and reconstructing episodes that may or may not have happened. She directs a memory that runs backward and forward in time, a memory at once anecdotal and universal.

Hillel Roman replaces his charcoal drawings with light drawings, the drawing hand with the computerized brain, the local dystopia with possibilities from other places. After negotiating with an AI software, images of the cities he wished to depict began appearing on screen: a utopian city seen from afar, teeming with fruit trees, shrubs, and ponds with nocturnal reflections. A city and another city and another city. Light and more light and more light.

The myriad cities, which we will never be able to reach, were created by the light of the computer, glowing in a phosphorescent light, scorched on the screen before us fleetingly, until they disappear forever, only to be replaced by other cities. The images shine in a greenish hue, like a radar or a night vision device, disrupting the tranquility of these silent cities. The phosphorescent substance on which they are embedded, ostensibly tries to remember the light of day at night, to present the virtual reality in actual reality.

The blinding contemporary light—the light of screens and televisions, the city and consciousness, is pushed aside in favor of an attempt to see the smaller lights—the light of the nearly extinct fireflies, of the disappearing stars, of the glow of imagination. The stream of images conjures up, or maybe dreams, over and over again, about a pined for distant destination which the viewer is either approaching or fleeing.

Ten prints by Soviet artist Gury Philippovich Zakharov and a decorated antique shotgun; dreams of a better future, the thrill of a new beginning, two young daughters and a few other family members. In 1990, Ira Eduardovna’s parents packed up their lives in Uzbekistan and immigrated to Israel. Newcomers who arrived in Israel in the first wave of immigration from the Soviet Union were forbidden to take money, jewelry, and other valuables out of the country; thus, the couple invested the little money they received for the sale of their apartment in art.

There are moments when art can save lives. This wasn’t one of them. The artworks, which were intended to serve as a lifeline, to be sold and enable the purchase of a replacement apartment, ended up in storage, and like other immigrant families, the artist’s family too found itself destitute in a new, foreign environment. Thirty years later, Eduardovna revisits the lost treasure, hoping to take advantage of her status as an artist who has exhibited in museums in Israel and around the world, and reinstate the works with their rightful value; to turn them into her own art, sell them, and give her parents the money they invested in them.

Eduardovna works with the original prints, producing them over and over again, painting and engraving on them, marking the landscape she left with lines, gradually blackening it and eliminating all traces of the past. She replaces the rifle’s barrel with a porcelain barrel, on which she depicts the story of the rifle’s purchase. The brittle material deprives the rifle of all use value—the first bullet that passes through it will shatter the rife along with the illusion it carries.

By addressing issues pertaining to refugeeism and foreignness, and through her parents’ misunderstanding of the situation into which they were arriving, Eduardovna also raises questions about our lack of understanding of the place in which we live, about the constant sense of refugeeism we carry with us, and about our vain attempts to redeem ourselves.