Kinky | Dina Kahana Geller, Roni Packer

Curators: Reut Rabuach and Shelly Shavit

Opening: Thursday, 2/3/23, 19:00

On-line Gallery talk: Sunday, 23.04.2023, 19:30 For registration

Closing: Saturday, 29/4/23, 14:00

The exhibition Kinky examines the term through two installations of the artists Dina Kahana Geller and Roni Packer.  The term usually refers to unusual or strange passionate behavior and it does not have a translation to a Hebrew word. 

As part of the work the artists created an environment for the objects displayed:  Pecker uses a screen and Geller a protective “bed”. This layer deepens the emotional aspect connecting the artist to her work and the transition to its exposure to the public.  The tension created lies between peeping in and bashfulness, and the screen does not block or hide the object but rather envelops it and gives it strength.

It is possible to visualize the creative process in the studio as making a sensual world, unrelated to sexuality but connected to an ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a term researched in the last few years and related to Oddly Satisfying Video (not porno) which creates a response to a visual stimulus through repetitive actions, sounds (knocking, rustling, etc) and visual content.  This is a modern world of content that creates different unusualness that is not strange, distorted or perverted.  The exhibition Kinky invites the viewer to submit as one would when watching a video, through the movement of Kahana Geller’s object on the folds of the paper and the embroidery of Packer on the screen and the vague amorphic forms. The exhibition creates a space to experience the mediated emotions between the artist and the creation and the observer and the creation.

Kahana Geller and Packer each expose the intimate world of hidden objects.  Even though the objects are already in their new world on the shelves of the Small Gallery, they still expose the love of the hand that made them and continues to protect them.  In sculpture, says Kahana Geller “the all-embracing idea of the heroic battle with the material is cancelled. Art does not provide laws, it is vague, without instructions and without a basic measure.”  In her making she submits to the organic looking objects, with their female, monochrome curves, with smooth surfaces as the soft movement of the hand glides over the clay.  They sit on creased tissue paper that complements them and provide a comfortable display. Together they create an installation for the viewer to submit to. 

Packer’s works are unusual in the ceramic scene in which they are presented, they are naturally toned plastic looking figurines. The objects look like body parts but not a concrete organ. On some the fingerprint is very visible.   They might want to look like figurines but do not.  She describes her making: “In the studio I make flattened art and out of the studio, at home I bake.  The baked fimo sculptures are amorphic, with undefined color – what was once called skin color and today I will politely call earth colors”.

Dina Kahana Geller, b. 1948, on Kibbutz Lahavot Habashan.  She is an artist, sculptor, and painter.  

Roni Packer, b. 1982 in Tel Aviv.  She is an artist and painter.