Mifal HaPais

Drawing Reaction #13

From North America to the north of Israel, Revital Lessick presents another series of reaction drawings following a gallery tour in New York, Toronto and Haifa.

How Testo Junkie Transforms You

“An author who had taken testosterone as a drug in a philosophical self-experiment that she documented in a book - it shook me up so much that it wouldn't leave my mind." Michal B. Ron and Hannah M. Bruckmüller discuss naming, sexuality, fables, giving birth and giving death, in response to Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie.

Editorial

The show "Stolen Arab Art" that recently opened in Tel Aviv is tainted by exploitation, ignorance, incoherence, and impersonation. The organizers blatantly disregard the will of the chosen artists not to show their work in Israel. The members of Tohu's editorial board object to the patronizing act perpetrated under the guise of enlightenment and dialogue.

Emergency Takeoff: on Halil Altindere’s Köfte Airlines

"Köfte Airlines retraced a trail uncannily similar to that of its subject, from Germany to Turkey and back along a zigzag of uprooted expectations." Matt Hanson writes about Halil Altindere's work in the context of the refugee crisis, as well as the effects of the current oppressive political climate in Turkey on artists and cultural practitioners.

Memory Pictures

Hadeel Abu Johar travels roads and lanes of near memory, hinting at what is beyond, asking questions about the tension between the image and the event and about the human search for a place and its meaning.

Reading List

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2018 Issue: Editor's Note and Table of Contents
jadaliyya.com
The Night Journey of Ahmed Bouanani
bidoun.org
Academics explain David Foster Wallace to me
theoutline.com
מבט על מעמדה של הלשון הערבית במדינה בדמוקרטיה היחידה במזרח התיכון
hagada.org.il
more

Nuances of Belonging #10

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography.

Relinquishing Freedom (Willingly) to the White Man

A mother screams as her baby is wrenched from her arms; a sex fest featuring Canada's founding fathers and various forest animals; and Miss Chief – a powerful, sexy, transgender indigenous figure in traditional attire, beads, and feathers. Liora Belford visits "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience," the travelling exhibition of the work of artist Kent Monkman, who wonders where are the painters who have documented the hunger, the poverty, the pain, and the annihilation of a whole culture.

Drawing Reaction #12

Avner Ben Gal at Givon Gallery, Ron Arad at Gordon Gallery and Neta Cohen at Artspace Tel-Aviv. Revital Lessick presents another series of reaction drawings following a gallery tour in Tel Aviv

First Daughter of the Confederacy

Efrat Vital's show, Winnie (Real Daughter), presented recently at the Herzliya Artists' Residence, brings to the fore the denial and suppression of the problematic history of racism, slavery, and Colonialism in the southern part of the United States. Hagai Ulrich has visited the show, and he suggests thinking about it from a local point of view as well.

Obvious Artifice

"Pre-Israeli Orientalism: A Photographic Portrait", written by Dor Guez, focuses on a photographic genre from the early decades of the twentieth century as a local, unique, and complex case of visual Orientalism. Hagai Ulrich reviews the book and suggests broadening the conversation through the values and characteristics of performance art.

"Hēliotropion" - Shattering or Healing

In anticipation of "Hēliotropion," Tamar Getter's exhibition recently on display at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, H.S.L.R. talked with her about horses and other matters that preoccupy her in her work: painting stoppages, idealization, and painting as a "machine," immobile.

Organized Choreographies

Dana Yahalomi talks with Elinor Salomon about the work of Public Movement in the public sphere, about the political role of the museum and its collections, and about the technology of knowledge transfer. This is a second conversation in the framework of cooperation between Tohu and Kadist.

Gender and Senses: The Art of Anisa Ashkar

Anisa Ashkar's work uses the different senses to problematize the intersection of categories that compose together her multi-layered identity. Tal Dekel visits her recent solo show and writes about Ashkar's use of the whole sensorium to blend categories, destabilize and dismantle them.

Kings of Arabia

Visiting the Ameen Rihani Museum in Freike, Lebanon has started Matt Hanson on a path to trace the Hebrew translation of the well-known author’s Kings of Arabia, which came out only two years after the first Arabic edition. What were the motivations behind this translation and how did its impact evolve over the years?

Looking for Neighbors

"From a local perspective, 'A Good Neighbour' brought hope to an art scene wrapped in a dark curtain." Hou Rf reviews the 15th Istanbul Biennial, curated by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset.

Nuances of Belonging #9

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography.
The current column was shot using a DIY drone, built in Iqrith by Ghassan Toumie.

Drawing Reaction #11

Ido Bar-El in Kibbutz Baram, Israel Kabala in Tel Aviv, Niv Tishbi in Jaffa, and Tamar Sheaffer in Haifa. Revital Lessick wanders and reacts through drawings

A House is not a Home

In an age of great geopolitical stress, heightened nationalist sentiments and ethnic strife, and forced migrations, Christos Paridis visits the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and returns with thoughts about the search for a new home.

Fricative Consonants

Bar Yerushalmi visits the exhibition of the artists' collective Slavs and Tatars at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and joins them on a magic carpet ride through the demographic, linguistic, religious, and social realms of the kingdom of Eurasia.

A Cloud of Philosophy

Can it be that Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is not a book, but a restless musical album? Michal Sapir outlines a path for reading and interpreting the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein that meanders through music, literature, wooly clouds, crossroads, sea horses and ethics.

Stories in Reverse

Following his current solo exhibition, “Stories in Reverse”, at Piartworks in Istanbul, Huo Rf talks with Merve Akar Akgün about memories, commonality, queer culture, and artist’s privacy.

Metaphoric Sites

In the midst of the general lack of commitment of the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale this year, Avi Lubin visits three significant and interesting projects that offer metaphoric sites and spaces for experimentation and cooperation.

Portrait of an Artist as an Old-Young Man

As the art schools' graduation exhibition season is winding down, Tali Tamir revisits the work of two veteran artists – Dov Or-Ner and Dov Heller – and wonders why the radicalism that has bound the avant-garde to social values, crossed various lines, and melted away conceptual and geographical borders found no place in the major museums.

Drawing Reaction #10

Revital Lessick visits Pinchas Cohen Gan’s studio, Avital Geva’s Ecological Greenhouse in Kibbutz Ein-Shemer and the exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois and Atalia Shachar in Tel Aviv

An Illusion about Understanding

In Richard Deacon's comprehensive solo show at the Prague Municipal Gallery, to see the large-scale sculptures viewers must get close, bend down, crane their necks upward, focus on the small details, and then again step back and look at the whole work. These exploratory actions that the viewers perform with their bodies and their movement through space have led Hagai Ulrich to try to understand how Deacon manages to physically express ideas, symbols, and signs that cannot be realized in time and space.

Blood Spatter

Crop Marks, Sharif Waked’s latest work, is a life-size photographic self-portrait of the artist with his head cut off. Alma Mikulinsky writes about this beheading drama and tries to understand our fascination with images of head amputations, such as Henri Regnault’s painting of the brutal execution in Granada and Ned Stark’s decapitation in Game of Thrones.

Absence, Speculation, Text

"I must build a 20-meter-long bridge, made of words, to the mystery works by Amos Groswagel, assuming they are where they should be." Shai-lee Horodi writes from a distance about Amos Groswagel's show at Livluv 24 Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Drawing Reaction #9

Dreamers Awake, Giacometti, The Trickle-Down Syndrome and The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Revital Lessick offers quick drawings in reaction to a gallery tour in London.

In Search of Critical Curating

In light of the recent criticism of documenta 14 and the Venice Biennial, Noah Simblist returns to the book/magazine issue “Curating Critique,” to comment on whether and where curating and criticality might meet today.

Beloved Country

Orit Ishay's comprehensive show at the Prague City Gallery includes images of bomb shelters, military uniforms, mourning rituals, woman soldiers, and a scrapbook of local dried flowers that had been given to General Allenby. It seems that the entirety of activities Ishay engages in creates an interesting critical course in which information loses its content and reality sheds its substance.

Nuances of Belonging #8

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography.
The current column was shot using a DIY drone, built in Ikrit by Ghassan Toumie.

A Memory Gap

As part of a new joint initiative of Kadist and Tohu Magazine to publish video interviews, Elinor Salomon talks with Elham Rokni about reconstruction and memory, biography and history, Orientalism and men with a Middle Eastern appearance.

The Art of Struggle

The exhibition "The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation" has gone a long way to illustrate the struggle for the civil rights of blacks in the USA, but at the same time, it traps the art on display in a conceptual prison. Revital Madar writes about the recent exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

 

Athens before Kassel

A message from Europe’s past that resonates in Europe’s present makes a powerful opening political statement of documenta 14. Christos Paridis visits the world-famous exhibition and finds the decision to open it this year in Athens before Kassel more than just a colonial project of the German art scene.

Black Swan, White Swan

"Slowland," Bianca Eshel Gershuni's and Oree Holban's joint exhibition, opened at Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem in the wake of the highly visible dispute between the gallery and the municipality, and the latter's attempts at censorship. Hagai Ulrich visited the show and returned with some thoughts about the political prospects suggested by the space the two have built.

Coded Information

Over the past thirty years, Miki Kratsman has been active as an artist, photojournalist, investigator, and archivist. Hagai Ulrich reviews his new book, the result of collaboration with curator and scholar Ariella Azoulay. The book examines the way in which photography can turn individuals into ultimate suspects.

Security Check for Heaven

With a rich display of over 200 artifacts, the Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Jerusalem, 1000-1400,” subtitled “Every People Under Heaven,” intended to introduce the viewers to a peaceful, spiritual, culturally and religiously diverse place, which they imagine the city of Jerusalem to be. Rula Khoury visited the exhibition and came back with some thought-provoking questions.

Mobilizing Stills

 “The work of the photojournalists’ collective Activestills does not settle for reflecting the grim reality by providing representations of it, but offers a more active mode of photography that joins the protests of the struggling communities being photographed.” Nadeem Karkabi reviews the recently published book that covers a decade of Activestills’ collective photo-activism.

Nuances of Belonging #7

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Do the works of Michal Makaresco represent cheap fetishism and dubious situations? Were they made casually, easily, or on a whim? Hagai Ulrich visited the show at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv and came back with thoughts about good taste, honesty, as well as questions about weight and scale.

Playing Spirits

Between 1918 and 1924, the German missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde traveled to Tierra del Fuego and West Patagonia, the southernmost point in Chile and therefore the globe. Alma Mikulinsky writes about the traveling exhibition of Gusinde’s photographs, documenting his encounter with the indigenous people of the Selk’nam, the Yamanas and the Kawésquar.

General Land of Vision

Thirty-eight technologically complex projects, a century of experiences of the moving image, 18,000-square-foot of installations, drawings, 3-D environments, sculptures, performances, paintings, and online spaces: an immersive experiment or sensory overload? Rula Khoury visits the impressive exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Internal interactions

Contemporary painting as the wreckage pile of Modernism or genuine Modernist painting? Focusing on composition or the subjects? Hagai Ulrich writes for Tohu on "Take Painting," showing at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art.

Nuances of Belonging #6

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

The Travels of Reb Schneur Zalman Mendelovitch. Chapter 1: The Dream and the Fire

Reb Schneur Zalman Mendelovitch was a member of HABAD, an illustrator and miniaturist, who lived in Hebron in the middle of the 19th century; he has traveled all over the world. He is also associated with many surreal and anarchistic Hassidic stories. We follow his imaginary travels from chapter to chapter in the comics strip, as he wanders through countries and ages, from the Great Indian Rebellion to Akre during Napoleon’s siege and Victorian London. In the first chapter, Reb Mendelovitch leaves his home after seeing a vision, and ventures out into the world.

Two Point Perspective (part III): Forms of Refusal

 The third and final part of the essay by Noah Simblist focuses on Akram Zaatari’s use of dialogical exchange as an artistic strategy. While completely different in their dynamics and outcomes, Zaatari’s conversations with both Hagai Tamir and Avi Mograbi, he argues, reveal different degrees of both personal and political engagement and, at the same time, various forms of antagonism and refusal.

Temporary Structures

Many emotionally and politically charged places appear in Nir Evron's work, among them  Rawabi, the new Palestinian city, the Seven Arches Hotel on Mount Olive, in Jerusalem, and the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, USA. What happens to the concreteness of the locations and the specific political stories when the works separate content and form? Hagai Ulrich reviews Evron's show, "Masad (Foundation)."

Haus Atlantis

Following Karen Russo’s recent video work “Haus Atlantis,” which blends the genres of documentary, historical essay, and science fiction, the artist readdresses her work’s visual and textual elements in the form of a visual essay.

Built in 1931, Haus Atlantis in Bremen is a combination of patron Ludwig Roselius’ vision to restore the German racial identity by resuming the glory of ancient times, and Bernhard Hoetger’s expressionist, symbolist, and monumental architecture.

In Tlilli, in Tlapalli

Writing about Josh T. Franco’s work “In Tlilli, In Tlapalli: Three Tejanos in Red and Black,” Rotem Rozental follows the migration and reincarnation of individuals, colors, ideas, and legacies between New York City and Marfa, TX.

Two Point Perspective (part II): the Dialogical Exchange

In the second part of his essay analysing Akram Zaatari’s 2013 work “Letter to a Refusing Pilot,” Noah Simblist addresses a previous work by the artist that involved a conversation with filmmaker Avi Mograbi. Simblist is reading this work through the prism of dialogical exchange, referencing Grant Kester’s definition of “dialogical art,” as well as Ella Shohat’s observations on the identity politics of Mizrachi or Arab Jews.

Nuances of Belonging #5

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

Pleasures of the other flesh

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.

Homonyms

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.

Two Point Perspective (part I): Letter to a Refusing Pilot

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.

Nuances of Belonging #4

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

The Censored Chapter

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.

You are not Nervous, but You Should Be

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.

Upon Emergent Occasions

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.

Nuances of Belonging #3

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

Bio-Bibliography

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

Con-Temporary 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

 

An Expert Testimony

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.

Nuances of Belonging #2

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

Playing dead

“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.

When the Angel of History Plays with Fire

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.

Apocalypse Yesterday

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.  

Capitalist Realism: Then and Now?

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.

A Particular Shade of Red

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

Nuances of Belonging #1

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography

Under Construction

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.

Glimpses of an Interview

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.

Stealing from a Thief

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.

Black Box

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 Chosen People - a Small Guide to a Big Revolution

"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.

 

Fireflies

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.

ManApparatus*

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.

Tales of the Dead

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.

 

Large format, small text (for Hilla Becher)

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.

Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan

 “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 Gardener, the Farmer, and the Urban Vegetable Grower

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.

 

The Land of Widows

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

Boy with a Camera

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

On Color and Other Spaces

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.

Tohu is an independent online art magazine based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and published in Hebrew, Arabic and English

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