To the End of Land - Contemporary Art from Israel
Opening: 28 April 2018, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
A result of a unique collaboration between Petach Tikva Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, To the End of Land offers, for the first time in India, a wide exposure to the vibrating contemporary art scene from Israel.
Curators: Drorit Gur Arie, Or Tshuva
Artists: David Adika, Anisa Ashkar, Yael Bartana, Yosef Josef Dadoune, Atar Geva, Avital Geva Sharon Glazberg, Leor Grady, Judith Guetta, Dana Levy, Shahar Marcus, Nira Pereg, Orit Raff, Tomer Sapir, Dafna Shalom, Tal Shochat, Gal Weinstein, Sharon Yaari
Dana Levy, The Wake, 2011, single channel video 5:03, Gal Weinstein, Nahalal, 2018, carpets and MDF, d: 5 m,
courtesy of the artist, Braverman Gallery and Petach Tikva Museum of Art courtesy of Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan and Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv
Sharon Glazberg, Sand Land, 2014, MDF sheets, sand, and rusty steel pipes, Sharon Yaari, Sea of Galilee 1969, 2015, c-print, 400x260
350x360x380, courtesy of the artist and RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv
Yosef Joseph Dadoune, In the Desert, 2009, single-channel video with sound,
15:40 min, courtesy of the artist and Petach Tikva Museum of Art
To the End of Land, featuring the works of 19 contemporary artists from Israel, alludes to the political, social, cultural, and ecological conditions abiding in Israel. The exhibition surveys various ways through which Israeli artists today address the questions arising from the concepts of land, territory, locality and identity, as it offers a prism through which to explore the profound questions informing contemporary Israeli art. It introduces a range of references and artistic approaches to the changes that have occurred in Israel's human as well as natural landscape in recent years.
In the first decades of the State of Israel, agricultural labor was regarded not only as an existential necessity, but also as an ideological goal. Over the years, the ethos of agricultural labor as realization of an ideological vision began to crack, and the social relations with the land have been reshaped in keeping with the challenges brought about by globalization and market forces. The works of these contemporary Israeli artists offer a porthole through which to scrutinize some of the hot topics in current Israeli culture, but also reminds us that the fear of "the end of the land" in a time of unprecedented human exhaustion of natural resources is a meta-cultural concern which goes beyond national boundaries.