Two new public sculptures where the city meets the desert
Eitan Ben-Moshe: Stargate
public sculpture, 2023
Commissioned by Arad Contemporary Art Center (ACAC Arad)
Supported by Arad Municipality, Arad Community Center, the Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts, Art Lane Fund
This sculpture is the product of a long process and many visits the artist made to Arad in the last few years. It is the second work in a series of public sculptures, the first of which has been located near the artist’s home, in the south of Tel Aviv. More sculptures are due.
As an inspiration to this work, the artist cites the biblical story of Jacob’s dream: on his way from Beer Sheba to Haran, Jacob wanders in the enormous desert until he alights accidentally upon a place. Jacob positions his body on the ground and becomes a new reference point in the scenery: “an act in which a great random force encounters a familiar space, which would change irreparably’”, as the artist describes it.
"Stargate" brings together Eitan Ben-Moshe's contemporary practice, aesthetics, and ethics with those of the monumental outdoor sculptures in metal and concrete, created in Arad and environs since the 1960s - Igael Tumarkin’s well-known work at Mitzpor Arad (1968), and Israel Hadany’s red steel "gate" sculpture Frame of Mind (1991) are two notable examples. Ben-Moshe‘s sculpture is also a gate, but its title takes us to fictional, spatial, alien realms. Like other works by the artist, this “Stargate” is a unique merging of contemporary metaphysics and mysticism with ethics and materials that are solely of this world: synthesized, artificial, pretending. This sculpture does not puff up its chest opposite an empty or utopic space, but rather creates a moment of presence in a wounded, tense, lively realm.
Reinhold Zisser
Notgalerie Arad: The Art of Small Steps
1947 / 2023
Part of the project “On the Road Again” organized by the Austrian Foreign Ministry
Commision, the Austrian Culture Forum Tel-Aviv, and Arad Contemporary Art Center (ACAC Arad).
Supported by Arad Municipality and Arad Community Center
This wooden Gate is the entrance to Notgalerie, a project initiated by Austrian artist Reinhold Zisser. It originates in an old wooden emergency church built in Vienna in 1947, which the artist found abandoned. In 2015, he decided to transform this place of collective faith into Notgalerie – an emergency art gallery.
As a final step in the building’s transformation, the artist had dismantled it and has been distributing the numbered parts to over 500 people and places around the world. The different parts have since been functioning as meeting points for artists and communities, inviting various uses and responses.
The Gate in Arad is the key element of the decentralized Notgalerie. It is the entrance you go through to visit the gallery, as well as a gate to the desert.
