If, Then… Else

Five new exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art

Breath: Works from the Lemaître Video Art Collection / Goldreich De Shalit: Locale / Ofer Lellouche: Head and Hand / Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin: Noun / The Audio Project: Ofri Cnaani and May Zarhy: If, Then… Else

Breath: Works from the Lemaître Video Art Collection

Artists:

Clément Cogitore, Yang Fudong, Hayoun Kwon, Mohau Modisakeng, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Arash Nassiri, Enrique Ramírez, Anri Sala, Qingmei Yao

Curated by Marie Shek

                                Arash Nassiri, Tehran-Geles, 2014

                       Clément Cogitore, The Amorous Indies, 2017   

                                    Enrique Ramírez, Brises, 2008

The exhibition “Breath: Works from the Lemaître Video Art Collection” is presented as part of the France–Israel Season 2018. The opening will be in the presence of the Ambassador of France to Israel, the collectors, and representatives of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Institute in Israel.

The exhibition features nine breathtaking, topical works by nine leading video artists from different countries: Albania, Argentina, Chile, China, France, Iran, South Africa, and South Korea. The works explore political, mental, and social aspects of the human condition, while addressing issues such as identity, economy, natural resources, immigration, and search for asylum.

The curator, Marie Shek, selected the works from the unique Lemaître Collection, which includes hundreds of video works. Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître have collected art for over four decades, and have presented works from the collection in museums worldwide. They have focused on video art, with a passion for the medium as a dynamic, pithy expression of the spirit of the time.

Goldreich De Shalit: Locale

Curators: Arch. Dr. Zvi Elhyani, Arch. Talia Davidi

The exhibition “Goldreich De Shalit: Locale” showcases the extensive practice of the professional partners and married couple Arthur Goldreich (1929–2011), an artist, architect, freedom fighter, and teacher, and Tamar de Shalit (1932–2009) , an interior designer. They played an active role at key points in Israel’s architecture-and-design history in the second half of the twentieth century. Their archive was donated by their son, Arch. Amos Goldreich, to the Israel Architecture Archive, Tel Aviv. It is an unusual personal collection that offers an encounter with 1960s and 1970s Israel through interior design, culture and life style. The collection spans a variety of mediums – a twofold oeuvre that traverses fields and runs the gamut between the public and private, the political and personal, communal kibbutz and entrepreneurial projects, intellect and craftsmanship, and international precedents and ancient local inspirations.

Independently and in numerous collaborations Goldreich and De Shalit designed dozens of projects in cities and on kibbutzim: dining halls, communal centers, convalescence homes, businesses and offices, hotels and recreational centers, commercial centers, private domiciles, cultural venues, and a great many monuments and memorial centers. One of these projects was the interior design of the Herzliya Museum and the adjacent Beit Yad Labanim memorial center (commissioned in the 1970s by the architectural office Rechter-Zarhi-Peri). The exhibition brings Goldreich and de Shalit back to this locale, and recounts the central, formerly unacknowledged role they played in the history of the enterprise to create local design.

A comprehensive bilingual book about the work of Goldreich and de Shalit will be published in November 2018, towards the close of the exhibition.

Ofer Lellouche: Head and Hand

Curator: Aya Lurie

This is a personal, intimate one person show by one of Israel’s most important contemporary artists. The project includes sculptures, works on paper, and oil and charcoal works on canvas. It is a memorial endeavor that evokes the figure of a colleague of the artist and relates the story of his tragic death.

Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin: Noun

Curator: Aya Lurie

Merav Kamel (b. 1988) and Halil Balabin (b. 1987) have worked together as a couple since 2013 while also maintaining individual artistic practices. Their output – together and apart – is characterized by witty humor, wild imagination, nonsensical spirit, and untamed confrontational inclinations. These attributes serve them in highlighting dark, sensitive, exposed, and painful aspects of individual and social human existence in all its weaknesses and limitations.

Balabin’s first name, Halil, has served as the starting point for their current joint project, created especially for the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. The project engages with the significance of one’s name, which is dictated to us from without yet functions as a deep inner element of our personality. It does so by exploring the various meanings of the Hebrew root ח-ל-ל (h-l-l) – from halil (flute), to halal (empty space), to halal (dead person, of a sudden, unnatural death). A scene depicted in the exhibition, of playing with a flute made of bones, returns the flute to an archaic, ritual sphere – only to deconstruct the secret magical power of the instrument and its name, and blow life into it through the use of creative spirit.

The Audio Project

Ofri Cnaani and May Zarhy: If, Then… Else

From the series “Useful Interventions in the Museum”

Sound design: Elad Bardes

If, Then… Else is an art work camouflaged as a museum audio guide, created by the artist Ofri Cnaani and the choreographer May Zarhy. It is an intervention in the museum space that will continue for an entire year. This audio piece takes its inspiration from reviews written by museum visitors on websites such as Trip Advisor. The “audio guide” does not provide information or interpretation of works on view in the museum; instead, it focuses on the visitors themselves, and invites them to take part in a physical, spatial, and emotional choreography in the museum space. It does so through a series of questions formulated in satisfaction-survey form, asking the viewers to choose between two options.  The visitors’ answers determine the route they take through the museum’s galleries. In this way, the piece provokes a unique awareness of the museum, of themselves, and of other visitors around them.

In early September a new Collection+ exhibition will open at the museum, presenting works by Chana Orloff (1868–1988) from the Museum’s collection, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth.

The exhibitions will be accompanied by events, encounters with the artists, lectures, and gallery talks.

Opening: Saturday, June 23, 2018 at 8 pm

Closing: November 17, 2018

Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art

 4 Habanim St., Herzliya, Tel. 09-9551011

Opening hours: Mon, Wed, Sat, 10 am – 2 pm; Tue, Thu, 4–8 pm

herzliyamuseum.co.il