TEL AVIV.- The exhibition offers an observation of the way in which art can capture something of the current, contemporary Zeitgeist. It centers on six large-scale murals created in the gallery, alongside works in diverse media by artists of various generations as well as archive photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by discussions with artists about the way in which their art faces current affairs.

The exhibition seeks to re-examine the place of art in relation to reality, and to discover within it the haste typical of the current moment.

This is also asked in regard to the museum as an exhibition space: can the museum— the palace of the bygone, location of art as a past event that has happened, became permanent and sacred—create a change in the current moment, remold the Zeitgeist as well as summarize the spirit of past times? Museum exhibitions tend to emerge slowly, and their power to react in real time is restricted. Thus, the world is often reflected in them as a bygone contemporariness, or at times—when they attempt to respond to the now and here—as a framed image, an ineffective island of a “world” within art.

The idea for this exhibition was formed only five months ago, under the impression of the two flagship exhibitions of contemporary art: the 57th Venice Biennale and the “documenta 14” in Kassel and Athens. In these exhibitions, it seems, as happens at times in political art, the possibility of interface between art and the world was often reduced to the appearance of an image: a direct image, seeking to be synchronized with current reality and report on it directly. Art appears in them as documenting the current while cultivating a self-delusion of political involvement in “what is going on.” In fact, it seems to relinquish its role as generator of reality, as the first to enlist at the front of the constant renewal of the current and re-inventor of the modes of realization of human life.

The exhibition offers contexts and sequences of meanings that deviate from perceiving art as a mirror of current affairs and extend its range of “being current” options. At its center is the question whether one can renew the demand for art’s status in reality as it interfaces with the world. How can one settle contemporary art’s huge strength when it operates and is deciphered in its internal contexts, against its embarrassing weakness when it turns outwards, to the current reality?

No work in the exhibition confronts concrete current images of current affairs. Nor does the exhibition offer direct representation of current agendas, such as news-style images of refugees or war zones, of the Israeli occupation or worldwide demonstrations about economic issues. It does not directly point to the information revolution or to changes of fundamental concepts about cultural and economic elites. This decision does not stem from a refusal to deal with current affairs. On the contrary, one of the positions that helped form the exhibition was that such images are often used to create a false impression of political activism and involvement.

The exhibition offers a posture of art regarding time and against it: a relative possible position towards the contemporary. A posture, because a posture always holds a temporariness, a momentariness and a potential for change. The changeable posture is offered as the only reliable way to realize the tangent with the contemporary. The universal yearning for timelessness is exactly what the exhibition opposes, while it realizes that its relevance is wholly temporary. Art confronts current affairs in its own elusive way, without directly touching them or significantly changing them. The curatorial act is caught in this elusiveness, in the present needs that summon the “no longer”: no longer relevant, no longer contemporary. Yet art’s interest in this inner failure is what makes it relevant and contemporary from the moment it is exhibited.

The exhibition continues with a screening of Karam Natour’s Nothing Personal
at the Jeannette Assia Galleries, Main Building.