Concrete, Bulimia

The culture of concrete and cement in Israel.  

Ceramics and Concrete: research in material culture

Gallery discussion Concrete Bulimia: Saturday 1/11/14 at 11:00

Curator of Benyamini Center: Shlomit Bauman 

Curator of the exhibition: Tali Tamir 

Part 1: Artist panel

  • Anna Dan – Painting with cement
  • David Goss – Painting with limitations
  • Dana Yoelli – Breaking Rocks

Part 2: Architect Panel

  • Arch. Yuval Yaski – Head of the Department of Architecture Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
  • Ido Ginat – Cohen Institute of History of Sciences and Ideas, Tel Aviv University
  • Natanel Elfassi – Tel Aviv University

Panel 3: Artist Panel

  • Yoram Blumenkrantz – Concrete in the southern space
  • Haimi Fenical – Building materials as art materials
  • Erez Israeli – Ashpara

Closing remarks – Tali Tamir


Curator: Tali Tamir

Artists:
Yoram Blumenkrantz, Guy Ben Shitrit, David Goss, Sharon Glazberg, Itzhak de Lange, Anna Dan, Noam Dover and Michal Cederbaum, Raanan Harlap, Dana Yoeli, Erez Israeli, Dina Kahana Geller, Tomer Sapir, Haimi Fenical, Muhamed Kais, Shai Ratner, Li Ramon, Gali Greenspan

The exhibition investigates the increased use of basic building materials – cement and concrete – as materials used in sculpture and painting in art in Israel over the last decade. Thirty years after the definition of Arte Pauvre, grey unexciting and uncelebrated concrete appears in art for different reasons. Not poverty, ascetic or secular but a kind of materiality that has seeped into local art from a concreted and fortified environment. Concrete, in the Israeli landscape appears everywhere; ingredients for local nourishment, a basic element in the Israeli ethos, the Zionist promise and hope. Concrete, Bulimia focuses on the cumulative process of concretization, of sealing and hardening; of the insatiable appetite and passion for concrete, the appropriate Zionist solution to every offence and threat. The exhibition touches on the cumulative build up that protection, shelter and walls create and the views the pain of the mounds of crushed concrete after the wars and the black clouds of dust the raise before our eyes.

The works in the exhibition refer to the clotted world, saturated with cement and concrete that appear in the drawings, the foliage, the pleats of our clothes, the folds in the body, the wrung rags, benches, cupboards, tiles, fires and utensils: a concrete membrane, a grey hard skin that envelops our emotional, political and cultural lives.

Photographs: Shay Ben Efraim

back to top