Eitan Ben-Moshe:
Stargate
ACAC, Arad, Israel
may, 5, 2023
Eitan Ben-Moshe’s exhibition takes place in two spaces with multiple and complex connections that are essential to the existence and development of the Center for Contemporary Art in Arad. Over the last few years, the artist has stayed in the city many times, devoting his time to wandering, photographing, drawing, and random encounters with people and environment. This process has given birth to a new outdoor sculpture, on the Moav Promenade, near the road leading to the Garny Lookout Point and the desert east of the city. This 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. The gallery exhibition includes documentation of the new sculpture and more works by the artist.
Eitan Ben-Moshe is a contemporary artist known for his outdoor sculptures (commissioned and otherwise). The new sculpture brings together his practice, aesthetics, and ethics with those of the monumental outdoor sculptures in metal and concrete, created in Arad and environs during the 1960s and 1970s. Besides Igael Tumarkin’s well-known work at Mitzpor Arad (1968), another notable work is Israel Hadany’s red steel sculpture at the Kidod Range, Frame of Mind (1991), one in a series of “gates” the artist has erected in several cities throughout the country and beyond.
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.
The Hebrew title of the exhibition (vayifga, and he lighted) is taken from the story of Jacob’s dream, which the artist views as the first installation or performance described in the bible:
“And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:11)
On his way from Beer Sheba to Haran, Jacob wanders in the enormous desert until he alights accidentally upon a place, near Luz (“city of immortality”). 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.
The works in the exhibition position the “Stargate” sculpture within the artist’s oeuvre and expand its meanings. A version of the installation “Ad Olam” (Forever, 2019), for instance, invites the viewer to lay down on a mattress printed with stains of wings of extinct butterflies, or imagine herself doing so. In addition, it presents works from the series “Phantasmagoric Cities:” digital collages treated with markers and correction fluid, which, at first glance, seem like star maps. Actually these are pictures the artist has found on the internet and fused together: images taken by amateur photographers from densely populated cities like Beijing, Moscow, and Shanghai. Ben-Moshe calls this series “A fantasy based on overstimulation and the excessive information of our time, new maps of speculative meta-cities.” Throughout history, star maps were used for navigation and orientation in space and time, as a kind of constant in a transient, changing world. Even though the crowded cities are light years away from the heavenly bodies, they are revealed as earthly galaxies or cosmic maps, with the collage creating new gates and opening in them.
