Find out more about the artists that will be displaying their work at the event.
Dafna Shalom
The Broken Kilometer, Jaffa
2009
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Statement:
Dafna Shalom studied at the International Center for Photography and graduated from Hunter College with a degree in fine arts. She assisted on various contemporary art projects for the multimedia artist Oliver Herring and for the Public Art fund in New York. Shalom exhibited video and photography internationally at venues such as the Minnesota Center for Photography, USA, Camera Obscura Gallery, Tel Aviv, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary art, USA, Petach Tikva Museum, Israel, Ein-Harod Art Center, Israel, CCCB Barcelona, The Jewish museum, New York, Forum Des Images, Paris, Tallinna Kunsthoone, Astonia, and more. Shalom divides her time between New York and Tel Aviv and is part of a dynamic group of artists, film makers and intellectuals of Arab decent (mizrahim) that explore their hybrid Jewish-Arab identity and act for solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Shalom also teaches photography, works as a graphic designer and was a photographer for the newspaper Haaretz in NY until 2005.
The Broken Kilometer-Jaffa,marks one kilometer in the multi-layered and politically tormented city of Jaffa. The video looks at the horse as a symbol to exoticism, otherness and power relations. Minimalist staged footage hint a hidden, allegorical drama in which the horizon line is emptied and transformed during cultural and construction transitions. The singular voice from the conversation about land ownership and control, is adapted from the prologue to the play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertold” Brecht. The sameness we often associate with the sea-sky horizon line is broken in this video as it becomes an allegory to multiple narratives and hidden memories.
Ashok Sukumaran
GPS (Glow Positioning System,
2005
Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery
Artist Statement:
The result of a vast collaboration with residents, private and state agencies as well as with a team of street decorators, Glow Positioning System, a 1200-foot ring of light encircling the historical General Post Office and neighbouring edifices in Fort, Mumbai, was put into effect by ‘viewers’ using a hand-crank, positioned in the center of the buildings’ intersection. The audience is able to ‘scroll’ the landscape, as light travels between buildings, across roads and onto trees and lampposts, forming an image-scape that is starkly visible at night. The physical length of the view becomes a chronological one, creating a vista, which responds to the desire for the panoramic; the age-old search for an image to immerse ourselves in.
The crank here refers not only to its specific history in the moving panorama, but also to the history of the moving image: as a driver for cinema. Like the movies, the experience does not depend on the observer being physically displaced: you are clearly not going anywhere. Yet Glow Positioning System and, analogously, its filmic documentation are able to offer and deliver us on a multifarious journey traced upon the concrete city.
This project and others like it led to Recurrencies, an ongoing body of work in the electrical medium, of which two video documentations will be on view along with accompanying technical and architectural drawings. Electricity is power: a force in itself, as well as an imposing force of control. In these explorations, electricity ‘leaks’ between economically disparate areas, ties spaces together, holds them apart and travels the gamut of public, private and commercial space. Dealing with the idea of infrastructure as culture – not a role in which it is typically considered – Sukumaran’s work opens up the ever present and unchallenged paradigms of technology to contestation, aesthetic and conceptual analysis, play and sociability.
Artist Bio:
Ashok Sukumaran (b. Sapporo, Japan, 1974) holds degrees in both architecture (B.Arch., The School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi) and media art (MFA, UCLA). Over the past years, he has shown work in a variety of contexts such as commissioned and self-initiated public art in the US, media art festivals and art-world venues (including the Singapore Biennale). His work has received major honors like the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica, 2007, and the First Prize of the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, 2005. Sukumaran is also a co-founder of CAMP, a space for critical trans-disciplinary practice in Mumbai.
Hedya Klein (Israel/United States)
Xanadu- Revisited
2009
Digital Video
Courtesy of the artist
ARTIST STATEMENT: (should be printed just as it appears below)
ABOVE
a ziggurat in the clouds
a floating mirage –
an idea eternal order
BELOW
the deep blue sea
samples dumped into a fish tank
organic ambiguity
Dana Levy
Disengagement
2005
Courtesy of the Artist
ARTIST STATEMENT
The work was made during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August 2005. It relates to man’s basic need to place roots in the land. The treehouse appears and disappears like magic, emphasizing its temporariness. It was made during a artist residency at Hotel Pupik located in the Austrian countryside.
ARTIST BIO
Born in Tel Aviv
Lives and Works in Tel Aviv and New York
1997-1998 PostGrad- Electronic Imaging University of Dundee
1994-1997 BA Camberwell College of Art, London.
Won the 2008 Young Israeli Artist Award
Solo exhibitions include at: Habres+Partner Gallery Vienna 2009(upcoming); Tavi Dresdner Gallery Tel Aviv 2008; Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv 2004; Haifa Museum of Art 2004.
Took part in group exhibitions including at Cleavland Museum of Modern Art (2009) the Helena Rubinstein Pavillion Tel Aviv (2008), Jewish Museum Amsterdam (2008); Israel Museum Jerusalem (2008), Tel-Aviv Museum of Art(2006); OK Center for Contemporary Art Linz, Austria (2003); SmackMelon, NY(2007). Won the jury award at Hamburg short film festival (2006)
Took part in artist resindencies in New York, Florida, Austria, Finland, Berlin, and Milan
Yael Bartana
Kings of the Hill
2003
Courtesy Yael Bartana and Artis
Yael Bartana creates work that investigates society and politics and has become known for her complex visualizations in the forms of photography, film, video, and sound works and installations.
Yael Bartana’s Kings of the Hill video, screened for the Peace Market, revolves around Israeli cultural symbols and rites of socialization. Bartana assumes the position of an anthropologist observing a particular sector of the upper-middle class male population of a Western culture. Reading the work in a non-local context, however, the viewer is given a focused glimpse of the forces and myths underlying Israeli society and of its norms and values.
Artist Bio:
Yael Bartana (b. 1970, Afula, Israel) lives and works in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and wherever she is producing projects. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including: PS1 Contemporary Art, NY (2009), Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, Poland (2008); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2008); The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2007); Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2006); Museum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2005); Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2004); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2004).
She has also been included in many group exhibitions including: Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom (2008); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Spain (2008); Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2007); 27thBienal de São Paulo, Brasil (2007); Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2006); and the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2005).
Shayma Kamel (Egypt)
Untitled
2007
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Statement and Bio:
BACKGROUND
In my paintings, drawings and collages, I use images from different periods in Egypt’s past to look forward to a more open society. As a descendant of the Egyptian Nubia that constitutes the African aspect of the Egyptian identity, I have become obsessed by our primitive motifs and the vibrant colors of ornaments over beautiful dark bodies in the southern sun. These appear as visual motifs and are reflected in my materials as well as paint. I use traditional substances from my childhood such as henna.
With these elements I have developed a language with which I explore contemporary Egyptians womanhood and sensuality: specifically the meeting points between liberty and oppression, between East and West, between youth and age. By reimagining Egypt as a more tolerant place, my works hope for a better future where women ride around on bicycles and flirting between lovers is not forbidden. Walking in the streets of downtown Cairo I try to catch Egyptian faces, figures and body language in frames, inserting a missing intimacy and reflecting it back to my audience. Often varying only in terms of mark-making and facial expression, collectively these repeated faces silently looking out act as a quiet protest.
In the past few years, I have been working on these ideas in various projects which have been shown in Egypt and abroad.
