Province
“Loving Art, Making Art” festival, various public spaces, Tel Aviv-Yafo
September 06-07, 2012
Artists: Alona Rodeh, Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Guerrilla Tarbut, Hadas Ophrat, Meir Tati, Maya Dunietz,
Nevet Yitzhak, Société Réaliste, Tamir Lichtenberg,
Associate Curator: Gilly Karjevsky
Research Team: Anna Axenov, Na’ama Henkin, Mor Shavsha, Dina Yakerson and Ifat Peleg
The exhibition “Province: Visitor Center” concluded a continuous art and research project that began in April 2012.
The project, titled “Province”, addresses notions of the ‘public domain’ in the urban context as either concept, method, or value – notions that served as starting points for the participating artists, poets, musicians, and activists, who will show their works in two locations.
Underlying the project was the assumption that the public domain, an inseparable part of any artistic action, exists in the city in different modes and intensities – in the variety of buildings, structures, and mechanisms that comprise the shared urban fabric. The public domain operates on various switches that can turn it on or off, disclose it or conceal it: These have served us as access points into the field of social powers that make up the city. The name chosen for the exhibition, “Visitor Center,” has evoked the ambivalence inherent in the tension between the visitor center and the site it aims to represent – a relationship both internal and external, which places the viewer in an actual space by way of its imagined representation. The exhibition included the products, documentation, and the continuation of previous events in the project, as well as workshops, talks, and a historical archive of culture and activism in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
"Television Nights" were several curated video programs screened on TV sets, complete with remote controls. The programs featured video works, films and other footage by artists and cultural activists from around the world, and focused on the themes of ‘the commons’, ‘a eulogy to privacy’ and ‘bureaucracy’. Among the artists featured: ubermorgen, Acconci Studio, Broken City Lab, DJ Spooky, Hackitectura, Natalie Bookchin, Sigalit Landau, Katerina Seda, Roee Rosen, and Chto Delat.
Alongside the exhibition in Tel Aviv, the Arab-Hebrew Theater in Jaffa was transformed by Muhammed Jabali and "The Yafa Project" into another visitor center. Titled "Jaffa 2030," it invited an active imagination of Jaffa's near future as a cosmopolitan city, a city able to answer to the needs of this country's disadvantaged populations, to engage with the historical, personal and urban rupture of 1948, and to maintain contact with a network of Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean cities such as Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Tunis, and Marseille, as well as port cities of Greece, Italy and Turkey.
