Bein Hashmashot:
Between Night and Day
Group exhibition by the members of the Alfred Cooperative Gallery:
Joy Bernard, Liat Danieli, Ruti Singer,
Emi Sfard, Efrat Rubin, Talya Raz,
Rotem Ritov, Lior Schur
Curator: Dr. Revital Michali
07 September - 13 October 2023
Bein Hashmashot:
Between Night and Day
This exhibition is the first of the 2023–2024 exhibition season, consisting entirely of exhibitions dedicated to the theme: “Bein Hashmashot: Between Night and Day; End – Edge - Addendum”
During these stormy and hurtful times, we hope for healing. The threshold (the gallery) serves as a gate, an opening one must pass through in the struggle to restore the meaning, decorum and standards that have been lost. However, in order to recover, one must consent to linger in threshold spaces and in uncertainty, must agree to touch upon loss, to push up against the edges and only then, through inevitable change, imagine a new world.
Bein Hashmashot : Between Night and Day is a metaphorical space in time when elements and contrasts coexist, a miraculous space of comradery and unity, of development and change, of creation out of a sense of urgency (right before the end, right before the stagnation, right before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath). In the Mishna, in the time called bein hashmashot, the twilight between day and night, between the sun and the moon, ten things were created: the mouth of the earth, the mouth of the well, the mouth of the donkey, the manna, the staff, the shamir, the letters, the writing and the tablets. (Mishna, Tractate Avot, 5:6).
Bein Hashmashot is the first group exhibition of the members of the Alfred Cooperative Gallery to be held in the gallery’s new space in the Kiryat Melacha complex in Tel Aviv. The exhibition, curated by gallery member Dr. Revital Michali, constitutes a milestone for the Alfred Group in formulating the gallery’s role within Israeli art as a portal to a different and new space, a space that serves as a capsule where abundant artistic and social possibilities potentially coexist.
In an exhibition presenting a rich variety of artistic mediums, the artists exhibit works that address areas that peacefully accommodate paradoxes, in which the familiar takes on new meanings, good and evil exchange places, materials alter their characteristics, sound becomes silence, images become formless shapes, reason becomes unreasonable. The seeds of hope are also sown in all of these.
At the entrance to the gallery, visitors are invited to scan a QR code, plug in their headphones and listen to a sound work by Joy Bernard, who is inviting viewers to join her on a choreographic tour of the voice created in collaboration with composer and musician Lir Sharon. Bernard, whose works are usually rooted in her body and her physical presence, relinquishes control and offers gallery goers to give themselves over to the unknown and to embark with her on a journey in search of that which has been long lost - or perhaps never existed at all.
In her two-part installation, “The Body Is Still Here”, Efrat Rubin refers to the working processes and the use of diametrically opposed materials in her two different creative spaces: a dance studio and a studio for the plastic arts, corporeal versus material. Through a link between movement, painting and personification, based on the presence and disappearance of the body, Rubin creates choreography through painting. Painted body parts, taken from choreography Rubin created, emerge through peepholes along a wooden chest. She has reassembled these parts into a kind of story board of movement. An old record player with a painting on it has been placed beside the chest. Visitors are invited to spin the object into dizziness, until the painted body images merge and disappear into the void.
Rotem Ritov’s installation, “The Good Shepherdess”, is replete with references to mythology and Jewish texts. From a personal, female, and maternal perspective, Ritov replaces the symbolic male figure in “the good shepherd carries the lamb of God” with her own portrait. By shattering patriarchal paradigms featuring the “leader”, father, all-knowing shepherd, in whose shadow a herd that does not ask questions is led, she appropriates the role of protector and savior for herself, while simultaneously also portraying the herd. As part of the installation, charms for the nullification of victim-victimizer relations are distributed to the public.
In Talya Raz’s delicate mural, a space for passage is transformed into a space for rescue. Raz focuses on the line that marks the passage between worlds: between the world of water and the world outside, where the female figure can be found on the boundary between sea and air. Although this is a clear boundary, Raz’s painting blurs it somewhat; the figure’s need for air is pronounced and underlines its striving to dive into the depths, to release herself from the limitations of breathing and become one with the water.
In Emi Sfard’s video installation, “Once Upon a Time”, the forest serves as a place of transformation and passage, which functions as a liminal space between territories and stages of life. The symbolic forest in Sfard’s work is actually the local, concrete Ben Shemen Forest, which symbolizes a personal journey of growing up and loss of innocence. The beautiful, enchanted forest, which was part of joyous family occasions in her childhood, is exposed in her adulthood as a space that conceals the uprooting of Palestinian villages and the lives buried beneath this deed.
Even the bees’ wings created by Liat Danieli refer to materials that occupied lives that once existed yet are no longer. The wings, a continuation of the artist’s treatment of motherhood and bees, can also stand as an image of free lives that have been cut short. The sculptural object is constructed from bones, orange peels and pecan shells the artist collected and preserved at home. It was created in dimensions that fit the artist’s body, like a potential prosthesis which does not function.
The three monochromatic ceramic works in the exhibition are part of a series titled “The Sun Never Saw the Disturbance of the Moon”, created by Lior Schur. The vessels she created especially for this exhibition are dedicated to the elements that, according to the Mishna, were created during the time bein hashmashot. Shor works in clay, using hand-building techniques, but she intentionally works quickly, causing the clay to collapse inwards, such that the work is the product of a battle between destruction and building. The images carved into the vessels are reminiscent of ancient cultures and myths connected to spiritual and physical creation, secrets and paradoxes. In addition, she presents ceremonial objects in the form of stones, which she terms Pyrite (fool’s gold), through which she continues the material, mental and alchemic search that characterizes her oeuvre.
In the work “But a Speck”, Ruti Singer examines the gap between that which is visible and comprehensible, and concealed, subconscious layers and strata. Working slowly and meditatively, like an ant in a space infinitely greater than her own dimensions, Singer forged from tens of thousands of dots, a huge surface that seems from afar like a topographical or astronomical map, and in which the mysterious forms almost gel into meaning, yet remain unfathomable. Rivulets of dots break away from the boundaries of the main work, spreading onto the gallery walls, as if striving to take over the entire exhibition space. On the windows on the other side of the gallery, in the work "Order of Things", Singer wrote a string of words devoid of coherent syntax. When rays of sunlight shine through the windows, the words are projected on the floor and walls, sketching out the sun’s path. They are elusive, shifting and distorted.