Exhibition opening: Thursday, December 6th, 19:00.
Curator: Ayelet Zohar
Participants: Etti Abergel, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewamdowska, Miri Fleisher, Simon Fujiwara, Gideon Gechtman, Jim Hamlyn, Naoya Hatakeyama, Magdalena Hefetz, Erez Israeli, Elisheva Kamaisky, Martin Klimas, National Treasures of Israel, Tamar Schoer, Karen Singer, Tamsin Van Essen, Ayelet Zohar
Smashing!: Fragility, Deconstruction and Fragments in Contemporary [Ceramic] Arts is a project that considers the process of ceramic-making from the charged position of its deconstruction and the fragment. It is commonly accepted that broken ceramics have reached its dead end, usually ending up in the rubbish bin. Nonetheless, the fragility and delicacy of the ceramic material is part of its charm, and the shared love for pottery, ceramics and porcelain objects. This exhibition project is set to examine the stimulating momentum of death and rebirth, desecration and re-sanctification, deconstruction and restoration of the ceramic matter as it is represented in the work of visual, non-material artists, as well as ceramic artists. Therefore, Smashing! offers a collection of artworks that scrutinize the [un]holy moment of smash, blast and crash of the pottery object, along with attempts to reconstruct and re-contextualize the fragments that return to the substance stage to create a new phase and forms of life. Ayelet Zohar, the curator, invited a range of artists working in photography, video and sound to take part in this show, and added several ceramics projects that examine the possibilities of the reconstructed object in this context.
The exhibition is set to link between the concept of Deconstruction and its philosophical context within Jacques Derrida’s philosophy , and the materialistic context – the blast, the fragment and reconstruction. To this reading of deconstruction that crosses the lines of the ceramic process for the sake of converted thinking, from the fragment to the object, making that reflect on “the afterlife”, the theoretical move concerning the Chimaera, as an opposite model of hybribity is added; In contrary to the hybrid where varying sources are assimilated into a new entity, the Chimaera is a living model that contains past memory and the fundamental shapes of which the new form is created. The Chimaera, in the sense, is the opposite of the “melting pot”, since it permits the preservation of old identity together with reconstructing new shapes, aware of present formations.
Among the varying images among which the exhibition is present, different discourses on blasting, fragments and reconstruction develop. On one hand, artists that smash and crash with all their might dear and rare objects, antique and unique, versus those who feel great compassion towards every single broken glass or cracked plate. There are those of reconstruct new objects out of precisely cut fragments, and those who dare to build new order out of the debris of the old world. Even the installation of the rooftop of the gallery reconsiders the relationship between the world of deconstruction and fragments, and the memory, history and traumas of life in this place.
