Nir Harel:
Bed Mountain

The key work that had given birth to the exhibition derived from the artist’s wanderings throughout Arad in the real and digital space of the city. After discovering that there were almost no pictures of the city on Google Street View, the artist decided to work within this empty space, implanting figures and images from the repertoire of his digital painting, thereby turning them into public sculptures or permanent passers-by in the city. This work developed over the past year into a joint action with teenagers from Kedem High School, who implanted in the digital street map a procession of images they had created.

Other works in the exhibition also stemmed from the issue of reality replacements and our orientation within them. The exhibition was led by the principles of search and wandering that accompany the attempt to grasp everyday reality – a mountain was imported into the space of virtual reality (VR), adopting different distances for observing a landscape and different types of knowledge.

When the landscape had been immersed in the fantastic image world of Harel's digital paintings, a mountain became a bed, a shadow, or a contour of a body. For the artist, technology was a form of observation, and the works were delineations or states of reflection: they were driven by the desire to orient and dwell in a certain place, they wanted to be in Arad but were actually inhabiting a different space and time.