Muslin Brothers:
Nine Seconds around the Waist

Muslin Brothers, Tamar Levit and Yaen Levy, first arrived in Arad in April 2020. The sky closed, the doors closed. How long has it been since then?

 

The artist duo, who work simultaneously and continuously in the fields of art and fashion and move between Europe and Israel, have begun to observe the city and the desert, and the ways in which the clothed body finds expression in these spaces. Muslin Brothers approach the basics of dressing like researchers. They asked primary questions, looked for roots, and had found long chains of signs and meanings, one leading to another.

Muslin Brothers had invited the public to enter, listen, observe, imagine, remember, measure, cover-up, stare, isolate, join, ask, and answer. However, the exhibition had not only invited and called for action but also drew our attention to the actions we do all the time, to our choices, to the degrees of freedom and imprisonment that are in the smallest details. The artists have let the research, the open-ended questions, lead them. Then they drew the insights, processed them and invited us to take part in the experiment.

The encounter between art and apparel has been joined by a place and a time - Arad and the desert in which it lives, and our strange, detached, and unstable times. The pandemic, quarantine, and lockdown, combined with the desert - already detached from the urgent hustle and bustle - have led to an exhibition in which time is a significant element: how it is measured (clock time, linear and external) and how it is experienced (intuitive time, fluid and internal). In the simultaneous serenity and alertness of the desert, and the ancient time it holds, the body senses the physicality of nature,dryness, the rays of light. What does it mean to wear a place? "To wear the desert?"