A painter who has internalized the Western Orientalist gaze, a minor artist given recognition as lip service to the British Indian community, or one who offers a sharp, complex, subversive outlook on identity, society, and sexuality? Bar Yerushalmi writes for Tohu about Indian-born painter Bhupen Khakhar's retrospective at the Tate Modern.
Revital Lessick offers quick drawings in reaction to exhibitions, specific works, and art events. A new column at Tohu.
Hagai Ulrich on the homonyms in Yossi Breger's last show, on the relations between single words and the continuum, and on the idea of the abstract whole.
In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town of Saida that acquired mythological flourishes: One of the Israeli fighter jets that were sent to the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Ain El-Helweh, aborted its mission to bomb a school building, its pilot dropping the bombs into the sea instead. In a text for Tohu Magazine, that will be published in 3 parts, Noah Simblist dives into Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, instigated by this true story.
Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Ikrit once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography
Revital Lessick offers quick drawings in reaction to exhibitions, specific works, and art events. A new column at Tohu.
Merhav Yeshoron writes about the words in Yossi Breger's last solo show, and those absent from it.
What is it about a book that makes it a metaphor for the subject? Why do we want to identify with a book, to become a book? Liran Razinsky writes for Tohu about the fetishistic aspect of books and the relationship of books to the subject and the human body, as represented in “Bi-bli-o-logia: The Book as Body,” an exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art.
In a tale full of suspense, surveillence, interrogation, secret meetings, and covert conversations, artist Tea Tupajić describes the 2-year process of devising a new performance work in Tel Aviv, which involved Mossad and Shin Bet officers. A new essay in Tohu Magazine: we recommend reading it in one sitting.
“Welcome to the post-contemporary,” say the DIS collective, curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale, with the hospitality of border control. Michal B. Ron shares her impressions of the biennial in a new critique for Tohu Magazine.
Using 21st Century representational technologies, Brooklyn-based artist Carla Gannis tells stories through a “digital looking glass”, where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of the real and the virtual.
Writing a review of a recent publication on Afrofuturism for Tohu Magazine has led Lama Suleiman to explore the still-nascent concept of Arabfuturism and its potential relevance to the discourse on Arab and Palestinian cultural production.
Revital Lessick offers quick drawings in reaction to exhibitions, specific works, and art events. A new column at Tohu.
Michal B. Ron looks for eggs and feathers in Marcel Broodthaers's retrospective at MoMA
Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Ikrit once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography
“If, as William Burroughs has written, language is a virus from outer space, then Portnoy might come from a planet where dyspraxia is the common, acceptable mode of being.” Noam Toran attended Michael Portnoy’s performance at the Witte de With, and spoke with WdW’s director, Defne Ayas. He shares his insights on Tohu Magazine.
Can one bypass the fact that Roee Rosen, through his writing, manufactures his art as a closed system? Can one approach his art from different perspectives? Alma Mikulinsky writes about Rosen’s mid-career retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
What does the "con" in con-temporary art suggest? Saadi Nikro discusses the theme of con-temporaneity through the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, MUVART and Walid Raad
In Eyal Weizman’s new book, the reader joins the author as he hovers over contested territories in the Middle East, follows him as he traces the histories, ideologies, slippery borders, technologies, and narratives involved in the State-inflicted marginalization and displacement of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert, in Southern Israel. Rotem Rozental reviews “The Conflict Shoreline,” as well as Weizman’s methodology of forensic visual culture research.
Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Ikrit once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography
“The ability to study the world through empirical observations and to reach conclusions regarding the nature of reality has completely changed the way we experience the world around us.” Bar Yerushalmi on art and the science of consciousness at the exhibition “States of mind: Tracing the edge of consciousness,” showing now at the Wellcome Collection in London.
Michel Nassar in conversation with Rabia Salfiti on travelling, meditation, propaganda and martyrdom
Producing some of the wittiest artistic pranks in sculptures, installations, photography, and video works, in an ever more pompous art world, Fischli/Weiss have always advocated wild thinking. Michal B. Ron writes about the duo's major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim.
The Dome of the Rock – that golden, volatile rock of contention – is at the center of an exhibition at the Bezalel Photography Gallery. Noa Hazan writes for Tohu about the exhibition and about the visual research that has preceded it, which involved studying hundreds of photographs of the site from the last 150 years, and suggested new terms for looking at its visual representations.
In the current post-Occupy disillusionment, where the art world is dominated by commercial interests, could the term “Capitalist Realism” offer new strategy for change? Alma Mikulinsky reviews ARTMargins’s special issue on Capitalist Realism.
How different can two painting exhibitions be? Danny Yahav Brown on shows by Amir Nave and Yitzhak Livneh at Sommer Contemporary Art.
A play of accuracy and doubt, Walid Raad’s MoMA retrospective manifests the artist’s distinctive way of relating the affects of war. Naomi Lev visited and took the walkthrough
Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Ikrit once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography
How should the Athens Biennale be shaped when everything in Greece is in flux? Christos Paridis on the fifth and the sixth Athens Biennales - a 2-year artistic-political-social project.
Michel Nassar in conversation with Haitham (Charles) Haddad on his work process and his take on gender, fashion, religion and technology.
Having found out that the renowned art historian and philosopher, Georges Didi-Huberman, was coming to Tel Aviv University to give a keynote lecture, we asked Michal Sapir, the translator of his recently published book in Hebrew, to invite him to give an interview for Tohu Magazine.
How many artists today set a goal for themselves to live by their ideal of Art in the face of eternity rather than the community? Tamar Getter returns to Malewicz's Black Square
What did Michal BarOr do with the Pandora’s Box A. has left on her doorstep? Yair Barak describes the circles of guilt engendered by BarOr’s work, A Non-Private Collection, about a stolen suitcase full of photographs, with hope at the bottom.
Ferry, terminal, the beach, a hotel room, a border crossing – each one of these bureaucratic instances is exposed as an illusion. Danny Yahav reviews Ohad Meromi’s show, Resort.
"The resolution of the occupation is obviously not going to happen right now, but there are a lot of things that might happen very soon. The question is where to start.” The Yes Men’s Jacques Servin (aka Andy Bichlbaum) in conversation with Maayan Sheleff, following his recent visit to Jerusalem.
Did this year’s posthumous attempts at exhibiting Marcel Broodthaers's work rise to the challenge? Would his future retrospective at MoMA? Michal B. Ron is tackling these questions and their inherent paradox.
Inside and outside, secular and sacred, blindness and sight; ideas which emerge from analytical, non-seductive painting. Danny Yahav Brown writes about windows and stained-glass in Maya Gold’s show.
Could an egg-shaped artwork have predicted the internet? Alma Mikulinsky on “The Metabolic Age,” curated by Chus Martínez at Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
How does the tool, the instrument, change from an object to a work of art? How does it cancel itself (as an industrial object) and acquire new identity and meaning? Aim Deuelle Luski on the idea of ManApparatus and on the digi-image, following Matan Mittwoch’s show at the Dvir Gallery.
Emily Jacir’s and Jumana Manna’s shows, both now on view in London, invite viewers to an encounter with opposing strategies for dealing with the limitations of archived memory. Bar Yerushalmi on the two shows.
Thomas Hirschhorn with afterthoughts on the “Gramsci Monument”, an installation at a city housing project in the South Bronx from 2013. This was the fourth and last in Hirschhorn’s series of “monuments” dedicated to major writers and thinkers
In a long overdue encounter with Hilla and Bernd Becher’s photographic grid Yair Barak discovered that his intellectual, rigorous experience as a viewer of the works has become spiritual experience. Why has that happened, and is the genomic map of Israeli typological photography indeed close to its German counterpart, or rather the American one? Reflections and insights following the departure of Hilla Becher.
“We are art terrorists,” announced Katō Yasuhiro, who headed the Zero Dimension group in the 1960s. The declaration accurately represented the Zeitgeist and the volatile atmosphere opposite the political establishment, as well as the art establishment, which has pervaded Japan in the 1960s. Ayelet Zohar on an exhibition surveying the avant-garde in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan during that period.
The Agro-Art exhibition, curated by Tali Tamir at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art earlier this year, explored local agriculture’s representation in contemporary art. This essay expands the discussion on the difference between gardening and agriculture and focuses on the relationships between agriculture, territory, and biography.
Doris Salcedo addresses the collective trauma related to totalitarian regime in Colombia. Gabriela Vainsencher writes about the artist’s first American retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City
The opening days of the 14th art biennial in Istanbul were haunted by a child’s ghost, three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who had drowned during his fatal journey, fleeing Syria. Michal B. Ron on the Istanbul Biennial
Early in the summer of 2015, Robert Irwin returned to Dia:Beacon to erect an installation he has created in 1998, in a location where he himself designed both the building and its surroundings. However, the new reincarnation of his installation, Excursus, reveals more than Irwin’s long history of visual exploration.
In 2008-2009 David Reeb documented Ni'lin's struggle against the construction of the Separation Fence. In this short text he focuses on one of his paintings that came out of this activity
Color space is a specific way of organizing colors which facilitates the display and presentation of color through analog and digital media. This visual essay will not discuss color theory but rather how color is transformed into an object or, more precisely, into a form.
In preparation for the exhibition "Releasing a Butterfly," at Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv
