Rituals, Place, and History

The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation and the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel hosts the exhibition “Recurrence: Rituals, Place, and History – A Group Exhibition of Israeli Artists in Cyprus”.

The exhibition, which is curated by Drorit Gur Arie, the director and chief curator of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, presents the work of fourteen leading Israeli artists, who use video as their primary medium of expression. The exhibition features works by: Eyal Assulin, Itzik Badash, Yael Bartana, Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, Peleg Dishon, Jonathan Doweck, Nevet Yitzhak, Sigalit Landau, Dana Levy, Shahar Marcus, Nira Pereg, Dafna Shalom, Ran Slavin and Amir Yatziv.

The exhibition brings together for the first time in Cyprus, works by some of the most intriguing personal voices in Israeli video-art today. Their work reveals an affinity with the realms of ritual, Jewish symbolism, and cosmological cyclicality of life and death. The participants represent a generation of young Israeli artists whose members have devised a variety of strategies for approaching the harsh, polarized reality surrounding them. All videos respond to one stratum or more in the multi-layered structure of identity, be it their individual, public, cultural, historic, or political one. Some, like Yael Bartana, Nevet Yitzhak, Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck, appropriate forms, symbols, objects, and sites directly from the physical landscape, often to twist them into subtle political commentary.

Others, like Shahar Marcus, employ humour as a tool for deconstructing history’s explosive potential, while yet others, such as Ran Slavin, mix sci-fi aesthetics and archaeological fantasy to portray the peculiar way in which these elements affect everyday politics in Israel. The personal poetry of Dafna Shalom, Dana Levy, Itzik Badash, and Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, exemplifies the work of mourning performed by many Israeli artists, in an attempt to come to terms with the violence of history, the violence of social hardship, or simply interpersonal violence so prevalent in this region.

Drorit Gur Arie the curator, explains the concept of the exhibition: “Reconstruction and repetition, a cyclic human state of struggle, construction and destruction, a fusion of reality, speculation, and fiction, anchored in the fascinating relationship between ritual, place and history, are at the core of the exhibition ‘Recurrence’, which presents spectacular, stylized, and eye-pleasing manifestation of violence. Eros and Thanatos are thus bound together in a Gordian knot.”

until May 30, 2015
Recurrence. Rituals, Place, and History
curated by Drorit Gur Arie
Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre
19, Palias Ilektrikis, Nicosia