Conscious Collective

Tsibi Geva

Tsibi Geva (Kibbutz Ein Shemer, Israel, 1951) lives and works in Tel Aviv and New York. Of Ashkenazi Jewish origin and son of one of the leading exponents of the Israeli Bauhaus, he is among the best known interdisciplinary artists on the national contemporary scene. An artist with a strong expressionist trait, since the late 1970s he has presented his personal reflections on culture, philosophy and mysticism, placing the exploration of his own identity and that of his country at the centre of his work. His artsimultaneously addresses the political situation in Israel, the psychological consequences of the ongoing conflict and the resulting aesthetics.

Where I Come From is a modular painting made up of canvases of different sizes presented as a collective unit and arranged holistically.Each canvas is therefore independent, but together they create connections and disconnections: through abstraction and repeated motifs, these works are a metaphor for the chance encounters and decisions that led the artist – as well as many others – to return to live in Israel.

The piece sums up recurring motifs in Geva’s works: the repetitive pattern of the keffiyeh, balatot tiles, fences – typical of the reality of living in a socio-politically complex environment – and the theme of the border that characterizes life in a situation without a clear territorial definition. These elements unfurl rhizomatically in different and unexpected directions and contexts, with lines that form a sometimes endless road map, packed with continuities and disconnections.

Geva’s proposal shows how human experience is complex, evocative of kindness as well as conflict, and always destined to be accepted on its own terms.

photo: Musacchio, Ianniello, Pasqualini & Fucilla

Maria Saleh Mahameed

Maria Saleh Mahameed (Umm el-Fahem, Israel, 1990) lives and works in Ein Mahel, Israel. Born to a Ukrainian Christian mother and Palestinian father, and raised in Israel’s most populated Arab city, the artist embodies this complex identity in terms of nationality and religion. Her works, with their highly personal style, recreate intimate yet political narratives about Palestinian society. Black charcoal – a material typical of Umm el-Fahem (“Mother of Charcoal”) – dominates Saleh Mahameed’s work. This technique creates an intimate and visceral expressiveness, revealing the direct contact of the artist’s fingers on the canvas to the viewer.

The work on display, Ludmilla, describes an imaginary landscape that combines references to the cities of Umm el-Fahem and Kyiv, the birthplace of the artist’s mother after whom the piece is named. This is the first chapter in a series dedicated to the story of the artist’s parents, in this case depicting memories of her mother, a young Ukrainian woman who was driven by love to move to a society with a strong Palestinian cultural identity. Like memory itself, the exhibition narrative is not a linear retelling, but a fluid collection of images in which Soviet landscapes blend with Middle Eastern panoramas, featuring motifs ranging from Palestinian olive trees to Misha, the mascot bear of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Ludmila is a work about motherhood and intergenerational relations, set in different places around the world and marked by the identities and people closest to the artist.

photo: Musacchio, Ianniello, Pasqualini & Fucilla

Noa Yekutieli

Noa Yekutieli (Los Angeles, California, USA,1989) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist born to a Japanese mother and Israeli father, who lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Los Angeles, USA. Yekutieli’s interdisciplinary practice, combining sculptural elements, objets trouvés and the art of Japanese paper cutting, seeks to reconcile her often conflicting identities as a Japanese-Israeli-American woman by examining the tensions between human experiences and multicultural perspectives. In her work, Yekutieli combines different approaches to the depiction of space, forcing visitors to observe her works from different perspectives and causing them to constantly question the interpretation of the work itself.

Where We Stand, the installation featured in the exhibition, consists of cut-out paper windows that frame an amalgam of heterogeneous images evoking at one moment a natural landscape, at another a landscape of destruction and conflict. Together with the optical illusion created by the windows, this leads us to continuously probe our reading of the work and the perspective relationships between the elements composing it.
This distortion seeks to make visitors reflect on how the space around them can change their perception of themselves and society, while at the same time it invites them to examine subjective socio-political visions, showing how perception can be much more flexible than we think.

The installation questions people’s propensity to selectively open and close their eyes to reality, and to mask or deny the truth in order to survive

photo: Musacchio, Ianniello, Pasqualini & Fucilla