Events

You are invited to an artist talk with Ben Hagari (New York/Israel), a participant in Artport’s residency program for Israeli artists living abroad. The event will feature screenings of several works from recent years alongside a preview of a project currently in development. During the talk, Ben will discuss the creative processes behind his previous works and the research process for his current project.
Ben Hagari creates films, video installations, video sculptures, kinetic environments, animations, photographs, and exhibitions. His tragicomic work conjures unique absurd environments and wondrous worlds, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, between theatrical illusion and behind-the-scenes exposure. His work is the result of extensive research in literature, theater, art history, and scientific curiosity, aiming to rethink the relationships between object and creator, and between raw material and its production process, through play and role reversals.
Selected solo exhibitions include shows at Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv-Jaffa (2024); Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2023); The Boiler, New York (2022); Fundación CALOSA, Mexico (2021); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2016); Flora Ars+Natura, Bogotá, Colombia (2015), and more.
Ben Hagari teaches at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and in the MFA program in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York.
Image: Ben Hagari, “Behind”, Video, 2020

You are invited to a launch event of the outdoor sculpture “Luna” by artist Moshe Roas, at sunset on a full moon night.

The evening will begin with a performance in relation to the sculpture by dancer Or Ashkenazi, followed by instrumental music performed on the sitar by Ehud Ifrach.

As part of the initiative of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality inaugurating dozens of new sculptures in the public space by selected artists, Artport is happy to invite you to an event dedicated to the sculpture of artist-in-residence, Moshe Roas.

“Luna” is composed of three interfacing moons, as three simultaneous moon phases. One moon is set with a glass lens, allowing the absorption of sun rays and their refraction on the grass lawn that stretches on the beach promenade. Thus, the statue forms a relationship between two stars – the sun and the moon.

The moon, Luna – Earth’s only natural satellite, is a symbol of cycles and renewal in many cultures and holds within it the hidden and magical. It softly illuminates moments of madness, provides shelter for loving couples, and makes room for hidden night stories.

The statue “Luna” is dedicated to the bustling white city and to all night lovers.

The event will take place alongside the statue in Jaffa Slope Park.
The talk will take place in the adjacent constructed amphitheater.

Location on Google maps

Location on the interactive public sculpture map

Exhibition Tour & Meeting with artist Shiran Yitzhari
Friday Aug 23th, 11am
A conversation and additional points of view on Yair Perez’s exhibition with Oded Wolkstein and Assi Meshulam.
Sunday, August 25th, 7:30pm
Oded Wolkstein is an essayist and translator. Author of I’m Telling You I’m Dead (on Edgar Allan Poe), The Thicket, Infants’ Academy, and the collection of essays Night Shift. He was and editor at Keter Publishing, and translated into Hebrew the writings of Poe, Lovecraft, Flannery O’Connor and others.
Assi Meshullam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Haifa. He is an active artist as well as a curator and lecturer on arts and culture. He presented and participated in many exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and won several awards, including the Minister of Culture Award for 2014.

Pat Events:
Limbo: Exhibition Tour & Meeting with artist Yair Perez
Saturday July 13th, 12pm
Limbo | Wall to Wall: Gallery Talk
Curator Naama Haneman in conversation with artists Yair Perez & Shiran Yitzhari
Friday Aug 2nd 12pm

Artport’s artist-in-residence Esther Schneider in conversation with Emma Sham-Ba Ayalon and Dr. Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel about symbols, images and words. During the talk they will discuss the connections between the world of visual arts, Kabbalistic literature and the language of poetry, and the ways in which these worlds revive ancient layers of mystical experiences and present a space of sacred femininity.

The talk will be held in English

Events within the exhibition:
The Craft of Translation Closing Event
Live musical performance by the artist Eje Eje
Date: Thursday, May 16, at 20:00
Eje Eje (Itamar Kliger) is a musician and multi-instrumentalist focusing on string instruments, and founder of the band Satellites. Over the years, Kliger has explored folk music with a focus on regions near Israel, including North Africa, the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent, and Central Asia. His music is characterized by faithful adherence to the original and respect for tradition, while also pushing boundaries, seeking freedom from strict doctrines, and exploring yet-to-be-discovered points of fusion.
In 2023, he released his album “The Five Seasons,” drawing inspiration from the Chinese worldview in which there are five seasons—Winter, Spring, Summer, Late Summer, and Autumn. The album seeks to bridge the Western and Eastern perspectives and explores the similarities and differences between them. Like Vivaldi’s renowned work “The Four Seasons,” which tells a story allowing listeners to understand the seasons as Vivaldi experienced them, Kliger’s album aims to present an individual and subjective interpretation of the seasons and convey the personal stories they hold. At the same time, it underscores that everything is connected to form a larger narrative, both national and global. The music allows for an escape from the indoors to the landscapes outside, evoking a yearning and a deep desire for exotic adventure.

Gallery talk between the exhibition curator, Vardit Gross, and Ido Michaeli
Friday, March 15, 2024, at 12 pm
Exhibition tour with Ido Michaeli
Saturday, March 16, 2024, at 11 am

Celebrating International Women’s Day by adding more women artists to the Hebrew Wikipedia.

Artport is pleased to continue the tradition and join international art institutes, for a day of content writing on female artists. Let’s enrich Wikipedia with more information on great artists!

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In light of the circumstances the event will take place a month after the International Women’s Day, with pre-registration and following the green guidelines (vaccinated, recovering, or a negative corona test performed 48 hours prior to the event).

The program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content, translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew, and also music and strawberries.

Text writing and editing will be in Hebrew.

You are invited to a screening event and discussion around the video works of Tal Alperstein, an artist in residence at Artport. Alperstein creates video works that serve as a platform for performative action and an exploration of the living body, time, and space. The cinematic space and time serve as the backdrop for these actions.
In the video works, the encounter between performance and cinema allows for exploring immediacy through both mediums. Within the cinematic language’s spectacle, within a world where time is meticulously organized, Alperstein grants time for the action, for real-time, for the everyday, and for the mundane.
During the event, two of Alperstein’s video works, “Corridor” (2022) and “Home Movie” (2021), will be showcased. Following the screening, there will be a discussion with literary scholars Adam Ratzon and Dr. Oded Mandel Levy, along with readings from two of Adam Ratzon’s books: “Must Fight in Itself” and “And I, What Do I Care About the Clock”.
Adam Ratzon (1981) holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature, teaches and facilitates groups in education, literature, and writing.
Dr. Oded Mandel Levy is a literary researcher, writer, editor, and the founder of the “Tarshish” publishing house. He teaches at Bezalel and the Seminar HaKibbutzim.
Tal Alperstein (1985) holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and an MA from the School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. Alperstein is a multi-disciplinary artist, creating video performances and collages. Her video works have been exhibited in Israel, Europe, and East Asia, receiving awards and grants from institutions such as the Rabinovich Foundation, the Tel Aviv Municipality Special Projects Fund, and the Pais Art and Culture Fund. Her recent solo exhibition, ‘P’nim’, was presented in 2022 at the Livlin House in Tel Aviv.

As part of Artport’s new exhibition ‘More Than Enough’, join us on a series of events:
Fanzine Workshop led by artists Faina Georgiesh Feigin and Naga Or Yam
Friday March 1st 2024, 10:00am to 2pm
The artists will hold a fanzine workshop suitable for all ages, which will take place within the exhibition space.
Georgiesh Feigin and Or Yam, founding members of the BUSH Collective, have worked on publishing fanzines. The BUSH Collectives’ new fanzine, ‘Hope dies last,’ will be given as a gift to participants.
Ballad for a Thief: A show within the installation U by the artist Regev Amrani
Participating artist: Tal Ganor
Saturday 2.3.24
The event will take place in the work’s space at: 10:30, 11:30, 13:30
The show “Ballad for a Thief” connects the different anecdotes in the inspiration behind the installation “U”  Theft of property ignited the process of creating works that respond, dismantle and reconstruct the specific incidents of theft and respond to the act of theft.
Past Events:
Exhibition tour with curator Yarden Stern
Friday, January 12, 12 pm
“History of Sexuality” Recording of a live episode of the podcast series History of Sexuality on Nancy Schneider, hosted by Dotan Brom and Anat Zalzberg.
Thursday, February 1st, 7 pm
Nancy Schneider, a groundbreaking and inspiring figure, one of the pioneers of the transgender community in Israel, was a performer at heart and part of what was probably the first drag group in the country “Sex Bombs”.  Nancy passed away in November 2023, and we’re excited to record a live episode of our podcast “History of Sexuality” in her memory. During the podcast we will tell her life story, from her childhood in Haifa, through sex work in Tel Aviv and performances in Italian clubs, to becoming an iconic figure in the Tel Aviv gay community.
Anat Zalzberg is a researcher at the Walter Liebach Institute for Coexistence and holds an MA in Sociology from the Tel Aviv University. Host of the podcast “History of Sexuality”.
Dotan Brom is a PhD Candidate in history at the Tel Aviv University, one of the founders of the Haifa Queer History Project and a lecturer on queer history and culture. He hosts the podcast “History of Sexuality” and writes a blog under the same name
Fanzines as a Queer-Feminist Arena: A Lecture by Artists Faina Georgeish Feigin and Naga Or Yam
Together with the launch of the BUSH Collective new Fanzine, ‘Hope Dies Last’
Monday, Feb 5th 2024, 7pm
The artists, Faina Georgeish Feigin and Naga Or Yam, founders of BUSH Collective, which promotes queer-feminist art, will review the history of the fanzine, talk about collective labor, and discuss their new work ‘Valley of Peace,’ featured in the exhibition More Than Enough at Artport Gallery.
The Broken Hearts Club, hosted by Yonatan Harel
Wednesday, February 14, 7:30 pm
For Valentine’s Day, we will praise and honor heartbreak, and the songs that accompany it. Yonikul (Yonatan Harel) will wipe our tears away and guide us through Valentine’s Day together, between ballads, tears and out-of-tune singing. Yoni Harel is an influencer, a cute and funny gay guy who dresses very nicely.

Artport invites you to join short art workshops to take a breath and clear your mind, if only briefly, from these difficult times.
The workshops will be conducted by Artport artists and will take place on Sundays between 3pm to 6pm, for youth and adults.
Dates:
Sunday, 24.12: Hosting artist Shiri Cnaani for a Shibori workshop.
Free entry with registration – click here to register.
Important details:
1. Each workshop can accommodate up to 15 people.
2. Please note that you should register for only one workshop.
3. Each registration form will count as one spot in the workshop.
4. Priority will be given to people who have not participated in previous workshops.
5. Participation in the workshop is contingent upon receiving a confirmation email, to which you will need to respond to confirm your attendance.
If you are unable to attend, please update us via email or phone so that we can allow others to participate.
Past Dates:
5.11 – Clay Sculpture Session and Plaster Casting led by artist Lali Fruheling.
12.11 – Linoleum Stamp Carving and Hand Printing led by artist Moshe Roas.
19.11 – Suminagashi, Ink on Water, led by artist Maayan Elyakim.
26.11 – Hands-on workshop in the art of tattooing using the HAND POKiNG method with artist Guy Pitchon.
3.12 – Knot; Eye | Wet felting workshop led by artist Gil Yefman.
10.12 – Plaster casting with sand negative with artist Gabi Kricheli.

Nonfinito 2023, the year-end exhibition of Artport’s residency program, marks ten years of activity since the inception of Artport Art Center. A decade of studios for artists from Israel and abroad, of exhibitions and events, books, films, thoughts, and conversations. A decade of support for art and artists.
Exhibition’s curator, Vardit Gross tours: Saturday, November 2nd, 12pm and Friday, December 15th, 12pm.
The current show was conceived in dramatic, stormy days of internal and external disconcert. In a time of uncertainty regarding our place and reality, many of the featured works introduce alternative realms, at times utopian. For the most part, they contain only a fleeting reminder of the human presence that passed through them.
Ira Eduardovna returns to the moment when her parents sold their apartment in Uzbekistan. With the little money they received, they bought prints by a Soviet painter and an antique shotgun, hoping to sell them in Israel and buy themselves a new house. Thirty years later, Eduardovna revisits the items that have never been sold, trying to turn them into marketable art and reobtain their lost value for their own sake and for her parents.
Yael Efrati distills an urban memory from the architectural and human moments that comprise it. A key left for the guests is embedded in the entrance carpet at the end of the ramp leading to an apartment; handprints are seen on the graphite-coated bars, of the children who hung on them; piles of cat food are waiting in the corner for the real owners of these streets.
Chen Cohen explores the possibilities inherent in matter compared to the photography that accompanies it. Alongside a photograph that traces therapeutic movements without a patient, she presents new sculptural works that probe objects and elements surrounding her—a vase, a rack, her own body parts—while emptying them of their power and meaning.
Lee Nevo creates a parasitic cell. It leeches on the gallery walls to make a back space of sorts, which also functions as a confessional, offering a private experience within the public space of the gallery.
Avner Pinchover seeks to convert one form of energy to another, to breach physical and mental boundaries. He throws chairs against a wall, a stone against glass, shoots fluorescent lights at high voltage power lines, pushes the metal shutters of the security room in an unfinished floor, crashes his own body against a plaster wall. The moment of contact is the moment of explosion, and the moment of explosion is a moment of pleasure and transition—from one type of energy to a different one, from heat to light, from motion to fracture.
Hillel Roman built an image-displaying apparatus. The images appear one by one, shining in phosphorous green, like a radar or a night vision device, only to fade away and be replaced by new, brighter images. Like Roman’s charcoal drawings, the flood of AI-generated images conjures up, or maybe dreams, over and over, about a pined for distant destination, a utopian city, which the viewer is either approaching or fleeing.
* The tours will be held in Hebrew

Join us for a screening of GAZE IN BATTLE, a work by international artist-in-residence Ayla Pierrot Arendt, a filmic work based on her experiences in Israel. The screening will be followed by a discussion and open studio.
“The perfect sunset. A circling helicopter. The white cone of light seeks the beach and brushes me hard. But I don’t feel fear. It’s so cinematic. I’m neither on stage nor behind the camera. My position is in between. I’m lying on my back on the street. I ask to be filmed. I want to look at me lying there. It’s like a dream. The blue of the sky turns black. Images emerge, paintings come to life. The horses are freed.”
– Ayla Pierrot Arendt
—
Ayla Pierrot Arendt, based in Frankfurt a.M., Germany, is a visual artist and director of video art and live performance. Ayla’s work revolves around the exploration of sociopolitical themes through feminist reinterpretations and revisions. Her recent artistic projects often use public and semi-public spaces as stages for various art personas she embodies. These personas actively engage with the community, advocating for collective thought and action.

Inspired by the Seven Species as a symbol of local culture and history, the conversation will focus on the power of plants to mark place and boundary but also to challenge political narratives. A dialogue between Prof. Daniel Montrescu and Dr. Ariel Hendel with the participation of artists Ella Littwitz and Guy Goldstein.
The event will include a wine tasting session.
Prof. Daniel Montrescu is an urban anthropologist and researcher of food and wine borders. Dr. Ariel Hendel is a political geographer, researcher, and lecturer in politics, urbanism, and space.

Gallery Tour
A tour of the exhibition In This Earth, In This Soil, led by Savannah Gorton, alongside artists Dor Guez, Leor Grady, Relli De Vries, and Guy Goldstein.

Friday, June 2nd, 12pm

Film Screening and Talk
A screening of The Unpromised Land, 1992, (45 min) directed by Ayelet Heller.
Followed by a short talk between artist Leor Grady and Ayelet Heller with Q&A.

Wednesday, June 7th, 8pm

Curating Contemporary Israeli Art: The recent history through the women and exhibitions that defined it

Curated by Joshua Simon

Fifth lecture: Galit Eilat’s Agency

A conversation between Hadas Kedar and Galit Eilat

*The lecture will be held in Hebrew

A lecture by art historian and philologist Pauline Yermakova
How can a landscape painted almost 200 years ago inspire a modern artist? What tradition does Natalya  Zubarova follow? What rules does she break when she turns to the work of a 19th-century serf painter? And what is the secret of the Russian landscape as a genre?
We will talk about this and many other things with the art historian, philologist and publisher Pauline Yermakova, author and editor of many books on art and museums.
Yermakova is a post-graduate of the Department of Theory and History of Foreign Literature at St. Petersburg State University, and a MA graduate of the Faculty of History of Arts at European University at St. Petersburg. She worked in publishing at the State Hermitage Museum and the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Tuesday, April 4th, 7:30 pm
* The lecture will be held in English 
Gallery Talk – Artist Natalia Zourabova in conversation with Curator Vardit Gross 
Friday Mar 17th, 12pm
Maquettes Workshop – With artist Natalia Zourabova
*Maquettes are small models created to plan bigger objects such as sculptures, decors, or buildings. You will find examples of maquettes in our current exhibition “Arad” by Natalia Zourabova.
In this workshop you will experiment with scale and form to create your own maquette.
The small models that accompany the exhibition represent the various scenes: they deconstruct and reassemble them into scaled down sets, into theater stage maquettes. These are landscapes that are constructed after the painting, trying to imitate and expand it. More than they reflect reality, they reflect the pictorial reality: a desert generated by glued paper surfaces painted blue and yellow; a snow-clad valley made of corrugated paper; a broken perspective that reproduces the one captured in the painting. An attempt to build a world all her own, originating in the canvas.
In a sense, the maquettes are a continuation of Zourabova’s attempt to undermine the single perspective on the picture. She tries to break the painterly frame, whether by making the painting panoramic and trying to furnish it with the angles and depth of reality, or by expanding it beyond the traditional square. The scaled down models also allow us to choose our point of view: They reveal the world behind the picture, and allow us to expand the scene, to discover more about the play.
*The workshop and talk will be held in Hebrew

Curating Contemporary Israeli Art: The recent history through the women and exhibitions that defined it

Curated by Joshua Simon

Fourth lecture: Galia Yahav’s Pen

Speaker: Keren Goldberg
*The lecture will be held in Hebrew

The talk will deal with the unique planning of Arad, a town that was built as an amendment to the towns that were planned, built, and inhabited by the country before its establishment, though, in practice, it embodied modern international and urban concepts. These ideas were globally spread in a book that compiled plans for a new British town that was never actually built. But Arad, which was designed by its inspiration, came to life.

Architect Prof. Hadas Shadar, is a researcher of town planning and brutalism in Israel. She is a senior lecturer at the Technion and the Wizo Haifa Academic Center, where she is also the head department of the master’s program. She seeks to spread the uniqueness of Israeli planning, specifically spaces that are perceived as abandoned and alienated. Her fourth book “Arad: An Experimental Town” combines history and art (such as that of Natalia Zourabova).

*The talk will be held in Hebrew.

Celebrating International Women’s Day by adding more women artists to the Hebrew Wikipedia.

Artport is pleased to continue the tradition and join international art institutes, for a day of content writing on female artists. Let’s enrich Wikipedia with more information on great artists!

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In light of the circumstances the event will take place a month after the International Women’s Day, with pre-registration and following the green guidelines (vaccinated, recovering, or a negative corona test performed 48 hours prior to the event).

The program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content, translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew, and also music and strawberries.

Text writing and editing will be in Hebrew.

Third lecture: Dalia Levin’s Cluster
Joshua Simon, in the presence of Dalia Levin.
Dalia Levin is recognized more than anyone as the one who turned the Yad Labanim Museum in Herzliya into a museum of contemporary art in Herzliya for its many achievements – presenting female artists and young artists alongside established artists, an emphasis on video art, integrating young curators into the art field, education programs for a variety of audiences, the Art Biennale and more.

Future lectures:
March 12th: Galia Yahav’s Pen – Keren Goldberg
*The lectures will be held in Hebrew

In the exhibition “Hundred Muscle Army”, Effi and Amir tell the human stories of those whose identity has been deconstructed into their vocal apparatus and reduced to a single sound, which they can or cannot produce, and the way the system looks at them.

In the book “The Way Some People Talk”, which starts on the day he lost his voice, Yonatan Sagiv traces the silenced voice, which is later revealed during its restoration journey as a black box of deletions, scars and silences. While Sagiv’s memoir and Effi and Amir’s exhibition were created with no intended connection, these works that saw light simultaneously, refer and echo one another in the way they sketch the complex relationships between voice, speech and identity.

*The talk will be held in Hebrew.

Curating Contemporary Israeli Art: The recent history through the women and exhibitions that defined it
Curated by Joshua Simon.
Second lecture:
Sara Hinski’s Library
Maayan Amir and Yotam Feldman in conversation
Sunday, January 29th, 2023, 7:30 pm.
Future lectures:
February: Dalia Levin’s Cluster – Joshua Simon
March: Galia Yahav’s Pen – Keren Goldberg
*The lectures will be held in Hebrew

In this talk, Vanina Saracino will present the latest projects she curated in the public space and in non-conventional venues, especially referring to Other Minds (Screen City Biennial 2022, Archenhold Observatory, Berlin). She will argue that curating outside the white cube (or the black box) is particularly relevant for artistic positions rooted in ecological and socio-political concerns. In fact, it allows us to reach diverse audiences, interweave them, and temporally step outside our own epistemic bubble—creating instead a platform for unexpected encounters, contagions, fascinations, and also frictions. Activating these connections is among the most creative and challenging aspects of the curatorial work. The talk will also reveal the inevitable contradictions we encounter when embracing a post-anthropocentric approach.

The talk will be held in English.

Vanina Saracino (she/they) is a curator, writer, and lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Tel Aviv), and at the Institute of Time-based Media at Universität der Künste (UdK, Berlin). Her work focuses on theories and art practices that explicitly question anthropocentric and binary worldviews from an ecological perspective, with an emphasis on lens-based and time-based art practices in public spaces and in non-conventional venues.

In his talk, Stanislaw Welbel will present his recent curatorial experiences connected to working both with visual art and music. The talk is focused on how sound is present in exhibitions and how it could be used as a curatorial tool.
The starting point will be the exhibition The Cave of the Demons (Ivy Ma, Aifric Prior Beliere, Alona Rodeh) presented in 2022 at Collateral / Lateral Art Space / Cinema ARTA in Cluj-Napoca in Romania. The show in many ways referred to film and the moving image history and explored how soundtracks create a desired cinematographic experience. In the same way, exhibitions could have soundscapes that will determine how the audience would perceive them, literally amplifying the experience.
The second part will be devoted to two ongoing projects – a collaboration with Marie Farrington, which will result in an exhibition at Trinity College in Dublin (Spring 2023), and a mutual work with Suzanne Walsh which will result in a music/poetry album.
During the talk, we will have a short listening session of some older and most recent (not yet published, works in progress) music tracks.
The talk will be held in English.
Stanisław Welbel (b. 1982, based in Warsaw) is a curator and art historian. Currently working at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw as a visual art curator. In the years 2009-2019 worked at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. Presently, he is finishing his PhD thesis at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Welbel took part in curatorial and art residencies in France, Ireland, Israel, Romania and curated several exhibitions both in Poland and internationally. He collaborates with CPR | Curatorial Program for Research in the US and contributes to art and design magazines. Since 2018 a member of Polish section of AICA International Association of Art Critics.
Image: The Tanscuratorial Suitcase, 2013, Arnaud Pearl, Stanislaw Welbel, video still

A screening of “By the Throat”
The award-winning film by Effi and Amir, the basis for the exhibition Army of Hundred Muscles (winner of the Omomet Sade Award, Dokaviv 2021, and the IndieLisboa (2021) and Festival En Ville! (2021) awards)
Duration: 78 min
Link: By the Throat
Right after the screening: Artists talk with Dr. Laliv Melamed and artists Efi & Amir
Link:  Talk 
The screening and talk will be available online only.
Dr. Laliv Melmaed is a curator, scholar and lecturer for film and visual media at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She specializes in nonfiction and experimental film and media. Melamed is a senior programmer at Docaviv.

Curating Contemporary Israeli Art: The recent history through the women and exhibitions that defined it

Curated by Joshua Simon.

First lecture:

Sarit Shapira’s Wandering
Speaker: Naomi Siman-Tov

Tuesday, December 27th, 2022, 7:30 pm.

Future lectures:
January 29th: Sara Chinski’s Library – Maayan Amir and Yotam Feldman
February 12th: Dalia Levin’s Cluster – Joshua Simon
March 12th: Galia Yahav’s Pen – Keren Goldberg

*The lectures will be held in Hebrew

Image: Sigalit Landau, Temple Mount, 1995, Installation view at The Israel Museum,. Curators: Sarit Shapira, Yigal Zalmona

A moment after the opening of the exhibition ‘Hundred Muscles Army’ this Thursday, and just before Effi and Amir are going back to Brussels, we are happy to invite you to the upcoming events this weekend.
Exhibition events:
Friday, December 9th, 12pm – a gallery talk with the participation of Effi and Amir, and curator Vardit Gross
Saturday, December 10th, 11am – a tour through the exhibition with Effi and AmirWe are pleased to invite you to an online screening of the award-winning film by Effi and Amir, the basis for the exhibition Army of Hundred Muscles (winner of the Omomet Sade Award, Dokaviv 2021, and the IndieLisboa (2021) and Festival En Ville! (2021) awards).
By The Throat Film Online Screening and Artist Talk
Right after the online screening: Online talk with Dr. Laliv Melamed and artists Efi & Amir.
Dr. Laliv Melmaed is a curator, scholar and lecturer for film and visual media at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She specializes in nonfiction and experimental film and media. Melamed is a senior programmer at Docaviv.
Date and time: Wednesday, January 25th, 7:30pm
Screening Duration: 78 min
The recorded talk:

Artist residency programs all over the world grant artists the opportunity to live and work outside of their common environment, providing them with time to ponder, explore, encounter, and create. These programs are able to profoundly impact the professional development of artists, to broaden their horizons, strengthen connections with the international art world and advance them in all aspects.

Artport is pleased to host a panel discussion on international artist residency programs, mediated by Lilac Madar.

Lilac Madar returned this summer from a residency program at SVA, New York, with a crave for more and the will to share her experience with others. She will host a talk with artists who have participated in residency programs worldwide, each sharing their experiences and knowledge. During the panel we will try to answer some of the burning questions: How do you chose a residency program? How do you get accepted? What do you do there? What is it good for?

Participants: Gil Yefman, Dan Allon, Vardi Bobrow, Liat Livni and Lilac Madar

<iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/779857664?h=a4ddeef57f” width=”640″ height=”564″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; fullscreen” allowfullscreen></iframe>

“NonFinito 2022,” the year-end exhibition of the Artport residency program, presents new ideas and projects that took shape on our two studio floors over the past year. As part of the exhibition, we will host several gallery tours:
Lali Fruheling – Friday, September 23rd, 11am
Maayan Elyakim – Saturday, October 1st, 12pm
Tomer Dekel – Friday, October 14th, 11am
Ana Wild – Thursday, October 27th, 6pm
Keren Gueller – Friday, November 11th, 11am
Nardeen Srouji – Saturday, November 19th, 12pm
Originally referring to unfinished sculptures by Renaissance masters, the term “non finito” also indicates the conscious desire to represent ideas in various stages of implementation, challenging notions of outcome, conclusion, and end. This year, “NonFinito” also stands for the possibility that we will not always be able to finish what we began; that not everything is in our hands. Memento mori (Latin: remember you must die) is the insight that danger and desistance are out there, waiting for us; an insight that has become more substantial this year. Under the so called “new normalcy,” we are experiencing a year of adjusting to life after; a life lived under a constant reminder that everything can change, everything can come to a stop in the blink of an eye.

The notion of memento mori overarches the works in the exhibition: from Keren Gueller‘s despondent sharks to Lali Fruheling‘s attempts to replicate and immortalize human figures. Unforeseen death is present in Nardeen Srouji‘s work, and it also accompanies the three women walking in the city while talking about redemption and miracles in Ana Wild‘s work. Our dying day hovers over the rotting scraps of wood, which were formerly swings, in Tomer Dekel‘s work, and informs the endless cycle of life and death, water and stone, in Maayan Elyakim‘s work.

The tours will be held in Hebrew.

Closing date: Saturday, 26.11.2022

International artists-in-residence Carolina Boettner & Rosario M. Aróstegui will discuss their previous works and share their plans for their residency at Artport.

During their stay in Tel Aviv, they plan to work in a rhizomatic way, with the city as the protagonist by generating an interactive installation in a space that invites visitors to explore new perspectives. When referring to the rhizomatic, their pieces represent the nonlinear network that “connects any point to any other point”, as described by Deleuze and Guattari.

Using pieces developed by both artists, the result of this emerging collective piece will constantly be growing and reinterpreted, looking to develop new dialogues and deviations between the pieces. Although they will differ in scale and material, together, they will compose a piece that engages the public in an immersive experience.

—

Carolina Boettner, Argentine German video-sound artist, works between Frankfurt, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. Since her first approach to the audiovisual arts, Carolina has focused her practice on a deconstructive attitude of what surrounds her. Deconstructions takes the established concepts and displays how behind each of these concepts one finds its contradictions, its hidden zones, its defeat, its others, its shadows. Deconstructions reveal the reasons that have led to the interpretation of that reality that structure that structure our life today. Revealing what is implicit in the subject is what motivates the artist to create audiovisual installations that highlight each part of the whole and invite the viewer to an immersive experience.

Rosario M. Aróstegui, Argentine German visual artist, works between Frankfurt and Buenos Aires.

“My work is a process of personal exploration and questioning. I am inspired by human nature: man’s constant confrontation with himself, and his desire of finding a balance when facing a world in constant transformation and in which the ephemeral predominates. Each work is unique, just as each person’s desire is to be unique.  A creative path of deconstruction and reconstruction in order to reach introspection and silence in our inner soul.”

Beyond Netai Halup’s concrete sculptures hover stories about different creatures: From The Spleenón, the Pons, the Darglám to his grandfather, Halup weaves tales ranging between reality and fiction.

As part of his exhibition ‘And Other Stories’, we’re excited to invite you to a reading event alongside Halup’s concrete sculptures, where his stories will be read for the first time by four voices.

Assuming that anything is possible and the works will embark on their independent path in any event, all that is left for Halup is to take his place as yet another body in the cluster of bodies he has created. He is no longer the parent watching from above, but rather plays an active role in the newly-created world. Even if we wanted to stop the story, it would be impossible because it is endless.

More about ‘And Other Stories’

Join us on a night in the exhibition ‘Dilating in the Dark’ by Maayan Shahar, accompanied by music played in honor of the sculptures and inspired by the darkness, by the musician Kutiman.

Through the title of the exhibition, “Dilating in the Dark,” Shahar reminds us of a well-known scientific fact: even if it takes a while, the eyes will eventually adapt to seeing in the dark. It is an invitation to a short-lived dive—until the senses come around and can once again tell the different layers apart, grasp space and depth, notice the intrinsic range of colors, knowing that everything will return to normal shortly.

More about ‘Dilating in the Dark’
Listen to Kutiman’s live track

Noam Alon, a contemporary art curator and critic based between Paris and Tel Aviv, will discuss the main topics from his thesis in the Sociology of Art (EHESS PARIS) dealing with the relations between artists and curators and the tension between authority and authorship.

Can the curation of an exhibition be considered an artistic action? And if so, how does it affect the artist and his creation?

Noam will also present recent exhibitions he curated in Paris, aside from case studies from historical exhibitions

The exhibition The Shortest Way to Happiness curated by Noam is currently on view at the Givon Art Forum, Elroy 3 Neve Tzedek (Friday-Saturday 11:00-14:00)

Right before he enters his new position as the Head of Photography Department at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Vardit Gross, Artport’s director, will talk with Gilad Reich, the festival’s curator. They will discuss the decision to initiate the Artist Film Festival, the need to create a stage for local artists working in this field, and what “Artist Films” really means.

Roi Boshi will talk about the projects of the Forensic Architecture research agency based at Goldsmiths College and the new models it proposes for intervention in the public space and its documentation. 

 Roi Boshi will discuss the projects of the Forensic Architecture (FA) research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Using digital and graphic tools developed by its researchers, the agency proposes new models for the documentation of and intervention in the public space. How do these projects allow us to rethink the materiality of photographic documentation in the digital era? What types of resistance and human rights struggles can be adopted from FA’s various studies?

Roi Boshi is a doctoral student in the Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University, and lectures on the history and theory of photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Hadassah Academic College, and Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art

Yonatan Omer Mizrahi

Image-based lecture with Ariel Avissar

Once Upon a Screen is an international project that was created during the COVID-19 pandemic, dedicated to the processing of cinematic childhood traumas through the creation of personal video essays, in an attempt to revisit the origins of trauma through the editing table. The project received great acclaim around the world, and the various works created for it were screened at international festivals and topped the Sight and Sound magazine’s list of “best video essays of 2020.” Ariel Avissar, one of the initiators, will present the project, screen selected works from it, and discuss videography and its affinities to the worlds of art, criticism, and academia.

Ariel Avissar is a lecturer and doctoral student at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. In recent years, he has been promoting the field of videography in Israel as an academic practice, initiating and involved in a number of international videographic projects. His works have been published in several online academic publications and screened at various conferences and festivals around the world.

Image-based conversation with

Amir Yatziv, Neta Spiegelman, Maya Arad Yasur, and Dr. Ohad Landesman.

Moderator: Vardit Gross

Behind the Scenes of Grass Widow: a play for three digital characters and an actress, a video performance by artist Amir Yatziv created for Artport’s Artist Film Festival, is based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s eponymous play, combining theater, cinema, reality TV, and computer games. Yatziv, actress Neta Spiegelman, who co-created the work, playwright and dramaturge Maya Arad Yasur, and documentary film scholar Dr. Ohad Landesman, will discuss the significance of the link between different media in the current digital age, and how it dramatically changes the affinities between reality and its representations.

Maya Arad Yasur is a playwright, production dramaturge, and scholar of the theater. Her plays have been translated to many languages; they have been produced in leading theaters in Israel and around the world, participated in international festivals, and published as books. Arad Yasur is winner of the Berliner Theatertreffen Stückemarkt prestigious prize for the play Amsterdam; first prize at the international playwriting competition of ITI-UNESCO for Suspended; and winner of Habima Prize for Emerging Playwrights for God Waits at the Station, for which she was nominated for the Israeli Theatre Award. In addition to playwriting, she is writing her doctoral dissertation on performance narratology. She also works as a dramaturge and artistic advisor in various productions, and sits on several artistic committees.

Dr. Ohad Landesman, is a film scholar and lecturer specializing in documentary cinema, cinema in the digital age, and animation. He is a member of the senior faculty of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. His doctoral dissertation, which he completed at the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, focused on the aesthetic implications of digital technology on contemporary documentary cinema, focusing on doc-fiction hybrids, essay films, and animated documentaries.

Film festivals have long since been a major hub for films made outside of the commercial film industry. At the same time, the number of contemporary artists who focus on filmmaking and call themselves filmmakers continues to grow, redefining the moving image and challenging the concept of “film” as we know it. In response to these trends, film festivals around the world are expanding the frames in which such films are screened. Not only do they present them to a wide audience, but they also fully support them: from helping with funding, through integrating the films into various screening programs to the distribution phase. How are film festivals related to the video works of contemporary artists? Which film festivals play a significant role in institutionalizing art films as part of cinematic culture? And how do you make your film fit into the world of film festivals, especially if you are an artist making his/her first steps in this world?

Evgeny Gusyatinsky is a curator and film critic working in the fields of cinema and contemporary art. He has been one of the programmers for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (since 2011), and the curator of Garage Screen, Moscow (since 2018). Gusyatinsky is a guest with Artport’s International Residency Program.

For workshop pre-registration click the link below

Image-based lecture with Tami Liberman

Jean Rouch, an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker, has made several films since the 1950s that have challenged the existing distinctions between art and science, between “Western” and “non-Western” culture, between researcher and researched, and between truth and fiction. Via creative collaborations with West African and French youth he addressed the key questions brought to the fore by the “crisis of representation” in anthropology in the 1980s, influencing the French New Wave and formulating some of the principles that would underpin participatory art practices prevalent in contemporary art. The lecture will include excerpts from his films; it will analysis of the unique work techniques he has developed, and place his work within the discussion of post-colonialism, documentation, and participation.

Tami Liberman is a scholar and lecturer in ethnographic and documentary cinema and a video editor. She has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, as well as at Tel Aviv University, the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, The College of Management, and Sapir Academic College in Israel. Her short ethnographic films have been screened in various festivals, including Festival Dei Popoli, and won awards.

A lone actress stands on an almost empty stage. Behind her is a large wall on which the interior of an apartment is projected. Underneath her clothes she wears a motion capture suit that records her body and facial movements, transferring them to three digital figures inside the apartment. thereby breathing life into them. The director, who is in the wings, synchronizes the character played by the actress with her virtual figures on screen in real time, using a control system. The point of departure for the performance is Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis clos) which recounts the story of three people—two women and one man—who find themselves in an apartment without knowing why, gradually realizing that they are there to stay, and that they are each other’s hell. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Similar to the original play, here too, the apartment is also a model, a representation, a substitute for something else: it is located in an IDF base in Israel’s south, yet simulates a Palestinian apartment in the Gaza Strip. Grass Widow combines elements from the language of theater, television sets, computer games, reality shows, escape rooms, and a military simulator.

Sound:  Binya Reches

Programming: Julia Bogonos

Duration: 30 min

How do you design an art studio? How do you convert an office building into a first-rate space for exhibiting art? Tours with Vardit Gross, the director and chief curator of Artport, and Keren Pozner, the gallery designer. During the tours, they will talk about the steps that were taken to convert the office building, which formerly housed startup companies, into a contemporary and dynamic exhibition space.

The tours will conclude with a visit at the exhibition of works by Guy Goldstein currently on display at Artport – “Finger Food and Future Mistakes” – which deals with world fairs.

“American architect and inventor, Buckminster Fuller, proposed the “World Game” as a way to examine holistic design approaches in relation to global problems. Players teamed up for multi-hour games on a room-sized map, during which they regularly received information from a computer and tried to tackle issues of excess and lack of resources, or fertility and migration trends. (…) These world games may appear like a legacy of the last century, but they are in fact the basis of current attempts to propose credible images and possible scenarios for unfolding global events, such as the state of the oceans or the climate crisis.

In his work, Guy Goldstein produces images that are both a tribute and a parody of the world games and the lofty ambitions behind them: fields of small events and miniature situations, a proliferation of textual and visual information, observing eyes as a recurring motif, and absurd machines, reminiscent of control panels that have gone out of sync.” Dan Handel, excerpt from the text in the exhibition’s catalogue.

Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on research-based exhibitions with special attention to underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. He was the inaugural Young Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, has developed exhibitions for the Venice Biennale and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and was curator of architecture and design at the Israel Museum. Handel holds a MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Ph.D. from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He is the architecture critic for the Haaretz newspaper weekend edition.

How and to what extent can institutions such as Biennials contribute to critical and progressive canon shifts within the art field? What is the function of Biennials between hegemony and counter-hegemony? Biennials today understand and describe themselves as sites of intervention in neoliberal conditions of which they themselves are a part of, addressing these conditions in critical terms while also fueling and fostering them. This faces us with a paradoxical phenomenon of neoliberalism and to an extent we must accept, that biennials today are both brands and sites of resistance – or, as Panos Kompatsiaris puts it, both “spaces of capital” and “spaces of hope”.
Such is the backdrop against which we will address documenta and biennials as contested spaces. After a brief overview of the history of biennials and their transnational politics this will be exemplified with the case of the last four documenta shows and their position within the larger context of mega exhibitions.

Tuesday, March 15th, 6pm
The talk will be held in English.

Image: Banu Cennetoğlu, BEINGSAFEISSCARY, (2017)
Ten aluminum letters borrowed from the Fridericianum and six letters cast in brass after the existing ones. Based on graffiti existing on a wall at the National Technical University of Athens as of April 6.
Photo: Roman März

Celebrating International Women’s Day by adding more women artists to the Hebrew Wikipedia.

Artport is pleased to continue the tradition and join international art institutes, for a day of content writing on female artists. Let’s enrich Wikipedia with more information on great artists!

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In light of the circumstances the event will take place a month after the International Women’s Day, with pre-registration and following the green guidelines (vaccinated, recovering, or a negative corona test performed 48 hours prior to the event).

The program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content, translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew, and also music and strawberries.

Text writing and editing will be in Hebrew.

Last chance for a night stroll through Hinda Weiss’ video park alongside original music and a glass of warm sangria.

William Chang, who appears and sings in Weiss’ video works, will join us from snowy New York for a performance before the exhibition closes.

More about the exhibition ‘Eastern Skies Blush’

Closing: February 19th, 2022

Friday, February 11th, 11 am

Via meticulous editing, Weiss presents a video collage that connects the different times: moments of despair and moments of respite, the parks and spontaneous gatherings, movement restrictions and lockdowns. The documented image is her raw material, from which she cuts and paints, builds new scenes and creates a different, parallel, possible reality. While the common use of advanced editing technologies is to falsify reality and present it as different from what it was, Weiss’s video collages bring us closer to reality as experienced. In the exhibition she proposes an intricate view of time and transitional moments; an augmented time which allows forward and backward observation at layers of reality that take place at different times and in different places simultaneously, crystallizing to form one image.

Closing: February 19th, 2022

An edition of 48 prints portraying the moon phases for 2022 by artist Maayan Elyakim.

Natural pigments and screen prints on cotton paper, 56.5×42 cm

Each calendar shows the moon phases that will appear in the night skies, for each day throughout 2022.

The cosmic element associated with the moon is water. According to the “Emerald Tablet” the moon is considered the archetype mother and supreme power. She affects the tides, the rise and fall of water levels, she is in constant change and enables the conditions for transformation. Ideas, thoughts and feelings melt and dissolve, just as the moon melts the months and days that pass, making way for change and revival.

The Moon Calendars are made by screen printing (repeating a stenciled image) on original works by Maayan Elyakim, which he created using marbling techniques on paper.

The uniqueness and distinction of each calendar and each moon printed on it, emphasize the tension between creation, change and revival, between the ephemeral and the eternal. The calendars are intended to exist accordingly – they are sold at an accessible price and a large edition so they can hand on people’s walls, in homes and offices, and remind us of the constant cycle and movement of the universe in relation to our daily lives.

Join us for a Christmas celebration with spiced wine and chocolate, a digital snowstorm and a conversation about photography, New York, wanderings and lockdowns.

Via meticulous editing, Weiss presents a video collage that connects the different times: moments of despair and moments of respite, the parks and spontaneous gatherings, movement restrictions and lockdowns. The documented image is her raw material, from which she cuts and paints, builds new scenes and creates a different, parallel, possible reality. While the common use of advanced editing technologies is to falsify reality and present it as different from what it was, Weiss’s video collages bring us closer to reality as experienced. In the exhibition she proposes an intricate view of time and transitional moments; an augmented time that allows forward and backward observation at layers of reality that take place at different times and in different places simultaneously, crystallizing to form one image.

Artport is thrilled to participate in ‘Loving Art, Making Art’. Artport’s events that will take place as part of it are:

Thursday-Friday, 14-15.10
Open studio with the artists in residence program – Maayan Elyakim, Keren Gueller, Tomer Dekel, Ana Wild, Nardeen Srouji and Lali Fruheling.

Thursday, 6pm-10pm
Friday, 10am-2pm

Labor address 8, Tel Aviv

Thursday-Saturday, 14-16.10
Nonfinito Artport’s artists-in-residence group exhibition. Special opening hours
Thursday, 12pm10pm
Hamal 8 Tel Aviv

Saturday, 16.10
Golden Howls by artist Gal Nissim

“Golden Howls” is an audio and AR journey through the Ganei Yehoshua Park (Yarkon Park) + a talk with Liran Kanniel, director of the Birding Park, Ganei Yehoshua.

Saturday, 16.10, 4.30pm

Starting point:
Meeting point at the Sailing Lake plaza (in the northwest corner), Ganei Yehoshua, Tel Aviv

Participation is free of charge, but requirs pre-registration (limited to 50 people). To register.

When the sun set the howls begin, this is the singing of the Golden Jackals. They welcome the moon that symbolise the beginning of another day in their urban life.Participants are welcome to listen on their cellphones to a walk in the footsteps of the jackals and their cubs, follow in the footsteps of the Egyptian jackal “Anubis” and observe the various meeting points of man and wildlife, living around the park.

Through a designated app, in a 50-minute tour, participants will observe the park like they have never before. Viewed from their phone screen, they will discover more layers in the park’s story and the animals that inhabit it.

The tour:
The tour is a personal tour of each participant individually, and includes a 50-minute walk according to the instructions that will be heard by each participant’s headphones, through the app that will be downloaded to his or her phone device.

App details:
It is recommended to download the app in advance from the app stores or use the Web App (does not support AR). Please arrive with a charged headset and smartphone.

Download links:
Google Play
App Store
אפליקצית מוביל לא תומכת AR

Directions and parking:
For those with vehicles, a recommended parking:
Ganei Yehoshua parking lot, Rokach 94, Tel Aviv-Yafo (Ahuzat HaHof parking lot). From there walk the main path of the park heading south to the lake.
Ganei Yehoshua Park (Yarkon Park) – kurkar parking lot, entrance from Rokach Street, Ramat Gan, number 74 (free parking). From there walk through seven mills towards the northwest corner of the lake.

How to get to Ganei Yehoshua Park in Tel Aviv-Yafo, via public transportation:
Buses: 278, 44, 47, 48, 57
Israel Railways: Ashkelon – Netanya line, Beer Sheva Central line – Kfar Saba, Beit Shemesh – Netanya line, Binyamina – Rehovot line, Herzliya – Jerusalem / Yitzhak Navon line.

Spectacular simulations of a Mediterranean landscape are projected on a screen in a dark space. Between weeping willows and desert sands, walls of buildings and stubborn thorns, computerized figures emerge like savages, as in a dream. This is an innovative military range. The computerized characters are the targets in the range. Waiting. 

A new character is introduced into the range—an avatar; a real actor wearing an animation suit that copies his movements onto the screen. The characters on screen imitate the person, who, in turn, imitates them in an endless loop of simulation that strives to create a reality, and of a reality imprisoned within endless simulation; an impossible vicious circle of characters that no one really sees, whether on or off screen. 

Actor: Uri Dicker

On imagination and the intervention in each other’s works at NonFinito exhibition

Tchelet Ram and Shahar Yahalom’s artworks stray between their designated exhibition spaces and visit each other. Shahar’s ceramic sculptures ground Tchelet’s memory garments with their materiality; they hold the door open for her, as a reminder of physical presence no longer there. The fragility of Tchelet’s wooden branch indicates the absent space in Shahar’s bench, defining boundaries for the visitors.
Shahar and Tchelet, friends and co-residents at Artport, will discuss their collaborative thought processes, the intervention in each other’s work and the differences and similarities between them.

As part of NonFinito 2021, Artport’s artists-in-residence group exhibition

Images: Lena Gomon

Curator Vardit Gross in conversation with Artists Orly Sever and Maria Saleh Mahameed.

Monumental canvases are spread out on the floor in Maria Saleh Mahameed’s living room. The sofas are pushed aside, life is crammed into the kitchen, and art takes over the house; or so we would like to think. In reality, life creeps in, constantly, everywhere and at all times. Saleh Mahameed’s bare feet step all over the canvas, depart momentarily to take care of her newborn girl, exit the picture and return to it, leaving signs and imprints on it. Life and art, studio and home, mother and infant become one.

Saleh Mahameed’s works tell a story that progresses from the autobiographical to the general: Like the MRI, that wraps and binds at the same time, like the rabbits released from the hospital pajamas onto the canvas, and like her private phobia of horses crystallizes into a painting that conceals all of our fears.

Orly Sever scatters basic architectural forms throughout the gallery space—a bridge, a box, a rectangular pillar. We are forced to confront their existence, walk around them, acknowledge their essence. For a moment they look like monumental wooden blocks choking the space. We may stumble upon them while making a futile attempt to put them in order, as if there is an actual place where they are supposed to be. For a moment they look like living creatures washed into the gallery, trying to find their place, settle down and stabilize themselves. Giant ancient wild beasts gathered together, regulating their breathing, getting used to the bright light.

Via meticulous manual work, Sever puts the sculptures through a process similar to the one she herself experienced in the past year. An external process becomes internal—bruising, exposure, scratching, tremors, covering, sealing, and peeling. The structures’ protective layer—acrylic tar intended to seal and shelter them from the world—was damaged. Wounds are exposed, trembling from within; physical action becomes mental action.

June 24th, 6pm – Curator Vardit Gross: Adhesion and the connection between artists
                  
July 1st, 6pm – Artist Orly Sever: The tremble of material

July 8th, 6pm – Exhibition Producer Naama Haneman: Behind the scenes of an artwork

July 29th, 6pm – Artist Maria Saleh Mahameed: Life on a canvas

The exhibition cluster “Adhesion” consists of two solo shows presented side by side, connected by fine threads of color, matter, content, and a shared fate. 

Orly Sever and Maria Saleh Mahameed worked at Artport in the summer of 2020 as part of the short-term Israeli Residency Program. The program, which replaced Artport’s International Residency Program canceled due to flight restrictions to Israel, provided a studio and accommodation for artists living more than 100 km from Tel Aviv. Sever, from Kibbutz Cabri, and Saleh Mahameed, from Ein Mahil, reunited at Artport and became neighbors for a moment. Each in her studio created a differentiated whole world. Both, however, created a world predominated by thick black that swallows the viewer up like a black hole, requiring a closer look to discover the hidden colors and layers seeking to break forth. 

In “Adhesion” they present new site-specific works created especially for Artport gallery. In both exhibitions, the private world infiltrates the space, interrupting and disrupting the flow of everyday life, indicating the lack of natural movement, and confronting us with the total concentration we would have liked to dedicate to the work of art, to the moment itself. At a time when many are engaged in meditation, mindfulness, concentration, and centeredness, the works on view introduce the disturbances and incessant background noises; our inability to do only what we would have liked to do. 

Curator: Vardit Gross

Entrance to the exhibition from 8 Ha’Amal st. 

Opening hours during the exhibition:
Wed-Thurs: 12pm-7pm, Fri-Sat: 10am-2pm

Closing: July 31st, 2021

 
Human and avatar meet on stage at the Kingdom of Shadows and talk about love. Using a motion capture suit, the performer brings a virtual character to life, creating a digital human that combines the best of both worlds, man and machine, while challenging our assumptions of the possible relations between them.

As the exhibition ‘A Part from Me’ has come to its end, two events will take place:

A tour with the exhibition’s curator, Vardit Gross: Thursday, May 6th, 6pm

Naama Arad and Tchelet Ram in conversation with Michal Helfman and Hila Cohen-Schneiderman: Saturday, May 8th, 2pm

Pre registration is required:

Artport is pleased to invite you to A Part from Me
Catalogue Launch.

A residential apartment is being built inside Artport gallery. Front door, kitchen, bedroom, window, driveway. Its boundaries are fluid—the gallery’s interior and the apartment’s exterior blend; its identity is unclear—vacant but teeming with signs of life; its definition is blurred—a proposal for a dwelling within a gallery, inside a new white building, amid old garages, in a neighborhood undergoing transformation from a business to a residential zone, during a period in which people stay behind closed doors.

More details about the exhibition

Celebrating International Women’s Day by adding more women artists to the Hebrew Wikipedia.

Artport is pleased to continue the tradition and join international art institutes, for a day of content writing on female artists. Let’s enrich Wikipedia with more information on great artists!

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In light of the circumstances the event will take place a month after the International Women’s Day, with pre-registration and following the green guidelines (vaccinated, recovering, or a negative corona test performed 48 hours prior to the event).

The program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content, translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew, and also music and strawberries.

Text writing and editing will be in Hebrew.

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3,1). All matter eventually deteriorates. A responsible conservator is obliged to conform to the profession’s International Code of Ethics, which states that the main duty of a conservator is to strive to preserve cultural heritage for future generations at the highest standards. Nevertheless, could and should this task always be fulfilled? And how? Hadas Seri, a conservator at the Israel Museum, will share the nature of her daily work as an Object Conservator at the “Metals and Organic Materials Conservation Laboratory”. Seri will speak about a variety of projects that will exemplify the technical and ideological dilemmas conservators face in a museum context. The recorded talk:

Bio:
Hadas Seri is an Object Conservator working for the past 7 years at the Conservation Laboratory for Metals and Organic Materials at the Israel Museum (IMJ). She is a B.Sc graduate in Chemistry and Art History from the Hebrew University, M.A graduate in Art History from the Hebrew University, and second M.A in Art Conservation (artifact stream) from Queen’s University, Kingston ON. Seri interned in several institutions, among them: The Conservation Laboratory of the Greek Agora, The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, The Museum of Canadian Civilization, Ottawa, Canada and the Conservation Laboratory of the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University. In addition, she worked for 2 years at the Israel Antiquities Authority as a ceramic’s conservator.

The conversation will be held in Hebrew.

Credit: Amir Ronen

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Artport is pleased to present the unique and thought-provoking film ‘Another Planet’ (2017) by Artport’s artist in residence Amir Yatziv. This animated documentary embodies diverse aspects of memory and documentation. The film focuses on several creators of virtual simulations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. As Yatziv places them in the virtual worlds they have created, he takes us on a mutual journey while questioning reality versus virtuality, the aesthetic and the inconceivable, and the possibility to recreate or represent a traumatic space. Dr. Laliv Melamed and Dr. Ohad Landesman will host a talk with Yatziv, discussing the ways in which he works with computer animation, virtual worlds, fictional avatars and technologies borrowed from different action arenas. The recorded talk:

Another Planet from Artport on Vimeo.

Amir Yatziv is a filmmaker and visual artist. Yatziv is Artport’s artist in residence, and a graduate of Bezalel and UDK Berlin (Hito Steyerl class). As part of his occupation, Yatziv is interested in past narratives and their contemporary interpretation, when his works and films evoke a sense of alienation, through which he reveals the impossibility of one coherent historical truth. His works were shown in exhibitions and film festivals around the world.

Dr. Laliv Melamed is a curator, scholar and lecturer for film and visual media at the Goethe  University, Frankfurt. She specializes in nonfiction and experimental film and media. Melamed is a senior programmer at Docaviv. Together with Gilad Reich she co-directed the Platform for Alternative Documentation at Artport.

Dr. Ohad Landesman is a film scholar who specializes in documentaries, cinema in the digital age and animation. He is a lecturer in film studies at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University.

The conversation will be held in Hebrew.

Join us for an online series with the participating artists at NonFinito exhibition. The recorded talk:

Artist Yael Frank and art curator Adi Englman in a freestyle-yet-committed conversation, from public-related art to the installation of artworks in public spaces. The conversation is held amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to the re-birth of public spaces in civic life, following lockdowns and restrictions of physical movement in public areas and following Frank’s recent installation – In a nutshell – at Artport art center, as part of the exhibition Nonfinito, which will be open until January 2nd, 2021.

The conversation will be held in Hebrew.

How do you design a protest? Every demonstration, protest, revolution or rebellion has a preceding goal for which people rise up, leave their houses and take to the streets. This physical and virtual act is guided by a language – words and design. Artport is thrilled to host graphic designer Lahav Halevy for a talk on the visual language of protests, here there and everywhere.

Lahav Halevy is one of Israel’s leading graphic designers, founder of Blue Collar Group (strategic consulting, branding and design agency), journalist, human rights activist and lecturer at various design academies. Halevy has been active in design for protests, social and political causes, and created some of the leading slogans and posters of Israeli culture.

View here:

Artport joins the cooperative and independent galleries for a weekend of art events, as part of “Loving Art. Making art.”, in order to raise awareness of the difficult situation the arts and culture world has been in since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Artist Rachel Levian, participating in Artport’s fall residency, and her band ‘Reish’ will perform an outdoor electronic rock show from the balcony of Artport’s building. The show can be viewed from the corner of Ha’amal and Ha’Manor Streets, according to the Ministry of Health regulations.

Participants: Rachel Levian, Ran Livne and Omer Rahamim.

Join us for an online series with the participating artists at NonFinito exhibition.

In a cross-generational conversation, artists Gil Yefman, Dov Or-Ner and historian Dr. Ran Or-Ner will discuss their collaborative work and professional subjects of interest, art, gender and the Holocaust. Dr. Ran Or-Ner will talk about his research and the lesser known narrative of Ilse Koch, wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald. Yefman will guide us through his new works in the exhibition with his unique point of view, while Dov Or-Ner will share his art and particular creative process.

Join us for an online series with the participating artists at NonFinito exhibition.

“Meet Me in Petah Tikva” – Scholar Gala Rexer in conversation with artist Ruth Patir.
In the months leading to the NonFinito exhibition opening, artist Ruth Patir and scholar Gala Rexer have been exchanging thoughts on the interconnectivity between bio-politics, care, technology and reproductive rights. In this online conversation scholar Rexer will be presenting her research on Israel’s fertility economy. Followed by a film screening and interview with Patir.

The conversation will be held in English

NonFinito presents new works by Artport’s residency program artists. It is currently on view at Artport gallery.

About the film : In “Petah Tikva” Ruth Patir observes the occurring circumstances set in a waiting room of the fertility clinic at the hospital in Petach Tikvah, wherein 3000-year-old figurines, Canaanite fertility deities, fill the room. The waiting figurines belong to the Israel Museum’s archeology collection, and have been placed by the artist in a fictional scene in the contemporary reality of August 2020. As they wait their turn and ponder their discharge, wild animals concurrently invade the metropolis and begin to operate within the major cities as they please.

About the guest speaker: Gala Rexer is a feminist scholar, activist, and writer pursuing a PhD in sociology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests materialize where bodies, borders, reproduction, and sexualities meet. Gala is a member of diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery and a fellow of Heinrich Böll

“I have always been preoccupied with history and histography, representations of the past, anything that has a trace. My interest is not in the past per se, but in its importance to our present.”
– Nir Evron.

Nir Evron’s new work, presented for the first time in this exhibition, is based on rare materials from Lehi (Jewish Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) archives—an underground organization operating during the British mandatory period. Never shown publicly before, these materials include documentation of paramilitary operations carried out by the organization before the establishment of the State of Israel, alongside reconstructions of various acts performed by underground fighters for the camera. As the film unfolds, Evron exposes details about the historical research he conducted, letting us in on his thoughts and reflections during the work process regarding the historical affinity between photography and war, the role such documentation was supposed to play for Lehi members, and the significance of exposing these historical materials today.

Right after the screening: Artist talk with Nir Evron, with the participation of curator Gilad Reich and poet Alex Ben Ari.
Thursday, July 30th, at 9 pm (Israel Time) on Zoom.

The recorded talk (Hebrew):

Gallery Weekend is a joint event of Tel Aviv’s galleries and art spaces, which will open their doors to public on July 2nd-July 4th, 2020.

Artport is excited to be a part of it! Through out this weekend will host several events:

– “Sight Lines” exhibition –
Open Thursday July 2nd until 10pm!

The exhibition featuring new works based on 16mm film, explores questions of truth, knowledge and aesthetics through the use of the analog medium.
New technologies that emerged in recent decades have damaged the status of analog photography and its associated values. No longer a single-use, reliable photo, but a digital, multi-faceted, ever-changing and manipulative world. The works in the exhibition reflect on these gaps, while observing and examining the materiality of the film itself. Using the character of the film as a registrar of time and as a registrar of place, illuminating the way we experience, remember and acquire knowledge, while pondering some of the great narratives of modernity – nationalism, capitalism and progress – that modernity with which the analog image is so closely associated.

– Tour with the exhibition’s curator Gilad Reich –
Friday, July 3rd, 12pm

– ‘Wall Piece’, Dor Zlekha Levy –
Thursday, July 2nd, 8:30pm – 10:30pm, projection on Ha’Manor and Ha’Amal st.

‘Wall Piece’ is a site-specific projection installation occurring in the space between Artport’s resident Dor Zlekha Levy’s studio and the wall of a building viewed from his window. Over the past few months, the artist photographed the wall under different lighting conditions, compiled the photographs and processed them digitally.
The complex, layered images that were created are projected back onto the wall from the studio’s window. The neglected wall, which stands completely dark during the night, is then exposed through the projection. Its central formative elements – the window frame, the remains of dripping white wall paint, the peeling plaster, the crumbling bricks, the plastic tubes – are also repeated in the projected images, creating a range of optical illusions.
In a feedback loop, the wall resonates itself and becomes infinite, a prolific ground for artistic action and a new perspective, which reconfigures the familiar urban space.

Thinking of public art and its limitations in the context of the current shut down of public space in our cities, and the change in social sphere as a whole. Sara Reisman, Executive and Artistic Director of Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and previously the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, will be talking about public art projects, citing examples of realized and unrealized commissions. Udi Edelman, director of the Israeli Centre for Digital Art and founder of the Institute for Public Presence will talk about contemporary art presence in the Israeli public space. They will join in conversation with artist Yael Frank.

The recorded discussion:

Image: Uri Katzenstein, Hope Machines, 2006-2007

The talk will be held in English.

Young filmmaker Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis’s disturbing film addresses a phenomenon common among gamers in the United States: cyber harassment as part of which one gamer learns the personal details of another, makes a call to the police with a bogus story, which sends out a SWAT team to burst into the second gamer’s house (who is being swatted). Since all online players see one another during the game, the violent raid is viewed by the other gamers streamed live, entirely subverting the differentiation between the virtual game and actual reality. In addition to testimonies by the victims of such raids, the film also consists of animated excerpts that draw on the aesthetics of video games, creating a threatening world teeming with beauty.
The film premiered at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA).

Screening: Thursday, Apr 30th 2020, the film “Swatted” will be available for online viewing between 8 pm to 9 pm (Israel Time).
Duration: 25 min
Link: https://vimeo.com/411992867

Artist talk: https://vimeo.com/413880872

*The talk will be held in English

Artport’s online film screenings and conversations with local and intentional video artists are part of Art/Doc – Artist Film Festival (artistic director: Gilad Reich), which will be held at Artport in the coming months. The festival will present video works created by artists who operate on the line between art and cinema, searching for new visual languages in order to represent, touch and intervene with aspects of reality.

We recommend watching the conversation with a cocktail – Cucumber Gin! Here’s a recipe:
1 cucumber
A strip of lemon zest
2 teaspoons sugar
4 slices of lemon
3 shots of gin
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice
Soda for serving

Using a vegetable peeler, shave 4 long, thin ribbons from cucumber; set aside. Chop the remaining cucumber. Muddle with lemon zest, sugar, and 2 lemon slices in a cocktail shaker (or a jar). Add gin and lime juice and fill the shaker with ice. Cover and shake for about 20 seconds.
Strain and top with club soda. Garnish with the cucumber ribbons and remaining lemon slices.

Yael Kanarek’s World of Awe is a multi-platform universe that is wholly unique in the history of internet art. Kanarek, an Israeli artist based in New York and among the first generation of internet artists, created this ambitious project 25 years ago, which can now be seen as a moment of transition from the first internet age, praising hypertexts and anonymity, to the current age, that of sociality, collectivity and constant connectivity as a form of hope.
Celebrating a 25-year milestone to this groundbreaking project, Kanarek, in dialogue with Dr. Lior Zalmanson, will be our guide as we collectively walk through World of Awe, and discuss the questions it raises and different tendencies in internet.
In current times, when the internet is perceived not only as a platform to expose art, but also as a medium for creative expression, we have the pleasure of returning to an art work that preceded this trend by many years and laid the foundations to what is known today as net.art.
To enter: http://www.worldofawe.net/objectofdesire/
For further information: https://www.yaelkanarek.com/world-of-awe

World of Awe’s most central components are three websites, each is a chapter comprising the WOA trilogy. Its narrative follows a nameless Traveler in the endlessly yielding landscape in a state of perpetual dawn and dusk, “Sunrise/Sunset,” entered through a portal in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Communicating only through poetic love letters, the Traveler diaristically shares discoveries and travails with their Beloved, who remains on the other side. The work challenges t

White City addresses the complex figure of one of the founders of Zionism, Arthur Ruppin, who was briefly an ardent supporter of the binational state idea as well as an enthusiastic researcher of race. It focuses on his 1933 meeting with German eugenicist Hans F.K. Günther, whose studies greatly influenced Nazi racial theory.

The film shows Ruppin as he visits the Weissenhof Estate, a neighborhood in Stuttgart famous for its modern architecture style, and experiences flashbacks which reflect his views. The monologues and dialogues within this film are based mainly on Ruppin’s diaries.
White City is the third part of a trilogy featured at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2014, which was preceded by Night and Fog (2011) and As from Afar (2013).

Screening: Thursday, Apr 16th 2020, the film “White City” will be available for online viewing between 8 pm to 9 pm (Israel Time).
Duration: 25 min. German with Hebrew and English subtitles

Artist talk: Right after the screening, Saturday at 9 pm (Israel Time) on Zoom, Dani Gal in conversation with Gilad Reich.

Watch the recorded conversation

Artport’s online film screenings and conversations with local and intentional video artists are part of Art/Doc – Artist Film Festival (artistic director: Gilad Reich), which will be held at Artport in the coming months. The festival will present video works created by artists who operate on the line between art and cinema, searching for new visual languages in order to represent, touch and intervene with aspects of reality.

Join us with Ginger-Whiskey Cocktail!
Ginger syrup:
1 cup of sugar
3/4 cup of water
1 cup ginger, peeled and sliced
Cook together for 15 minutes, let stand for an hour. Strain.
Cocktail:
Mix together –
2 measures of Whiskey
3/4 measure of ginger syrup
Serve with fresh mint and lemon slices

Tours and meetings with each of the participating artists will be held on Thursday evenings throughout the exhibition.
The tours are limited to 20 people and by registration only:

Thursday August 27th , 7pm – Ruth Patir – Register here
Thursday September 3rd , 7pm – Dor Zlekha Levy – Register here
Thursday September 17th , 7pm – Halil Balabin & Merav Kamel – Register here
Thursday October 1st , 7pm – Ella Littwitz – Register here
Thursday October 8th , 7pm – Gil Yefman – Register here
Thursday October 15th , 7pm – Yael Frank – Register here

Artport is excited to invite you to online film screenings and conversations with local and intentional video artists. The screenings are part of Art/Doc – Artist Film Festival (artistic director: Gilad Reich), which will be held at Artport in the coming months. The festival will present video works created by artists who operate on the line between art and cinema, searching for new visual languages in order to represent, touch and intervene with aspects of reality.

The first screening is the film “Watching the Pain of Others” (2019, 31 min) by French artist Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Galibert-Laîné’s work traces another work: Penny Lane’s documentary “The Pain of Others”, which deals with an illness that is not clear at all if it exists. This is a personal, intimate video diary created by the artist in her own room while diving into YouTube videos and online interviews she made. By redefinition of the words ‘illness’, ‘virality’ and ’empathy’, the artist, finding herself plunging into a world of cyber conspiracies, YouTubers, rumors and fabrications. The film was produced as part of the artist’s doctoral research project about “Netnographic Cinema.” It was selected by Sight and Sound magazine as one of the Best Video Essays of 2018.

Screening: Saturday, Apr 11th 2020, the film “Watching the Pain of Others” will be available for online viewing between 8 pm to 9 pm (Israel Time).
Duration: 31 min
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owrhy73jSXc

Artist talk: Right after the screening, Saturday at 9 pm (Israel Time) on Zoom, artist Chloé Galibert-Laîné in conversation with Artport director, Vardit Gross.
https://zoom.us/j/907046993
Meeting ID: 907 046 993
Password: 019479

Hebrew and English subtitles. The talk will be held in English

We recommend watching the conversation with Chloé’s favorite cocktail – White Russian! Here’s a recipe:
50 ml vodka
20 ml coffee liqueur
30 ml cream (or 15 ml milk and 15 ml cream)
Shake well and add to a glass with ice.

Don’t have a coffee liqueur at home? This is the time for a homemade version:
½ cup water
1/3 cup sugar
½ tablespoon instant coffee
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
¾ cup vodka
In a small saucepan, combine the ingredients (except for the vodka) and bring to a boil.
Keep cooking over small heat for 10 mins
Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow the mixture to cool.
Strain the liqueur through a fine-mesh strainer to remove all the coffee granules
Combine the vodka
Use it in your cocktail
Keep the rest in a sealable glass bottle in a cool area

Ten years ago, Rafram Haddad found himself imprisoned for 5 months in a tiny cell at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, Libya. From his current home in Tunisia, he will talk about his experience of isolation in solitary confinement compared to self-isolation today, about time that moves at a different pace, about daydreaming and reliving dreams. He will also discuss life in Tunisia compared to life in Tel Aviv, the different art scenes, the differences in governmental support for culture in Corona times, and why everybody, everywhere, can’t seem to stop cooking.

Just before Passover, join us on Tuesday, 9pm local Israel time (7pm, sunset time in Tunisia)
Bring a cocktail.
The talk will be held in Hebrew

The recorded talk:

‘Wall Piece’ is a site-specific projection installation occurring in the space between Artport’s resident Dor Zlekha Levy’s studio and the wall of a building viewed from his window. Over the past few months, the artist photographed the wall under different lighting conditions, compiled the photographs and processed them digitally. 
The complex, layered images that were created are projected back onto the wall from the studio’s window. The neglected wall, which stands completely dark during the night, is then exposed through the projection. Its central formative elements – the window frame, the remains of dripping white wall paint, the peeling plaster, the crumbling bricks, the plastic tubes – are also repeated in the projected images, creating a range of optical illusions. 
In a feedback loop, the wall resonates itself and becomes infinite, a prolific ground for artistic action and a new perspective, which reconfigures the familiar urban space.
 
The piece will be projected every Thursday, from June 25th to September 3rd, between 8:30pm and 10:30pm, Artport’s entrance, Ha’Manor/ Ha’Amal.

Sculptors Sophie Jungreis and Nachum Enbar in conversation with curator Vardit Gross, about marble, stone, and the carvings in between.
In conjunction with the exhibition “Welcome to Jaffa”.

A conversation with Tereza Jindrová, Artport’s curator in residence and Czech artist Tomáš Kajánek on their practices and trends in contemporary Czech art.

Tereza Jindrová (born 1988 in Prague, Czech Republic) is an art critic and curator based in Prague. She is generally interested in methods of creating curatorial ‘frames’ to layer different interactions between artists, artworks and the public. Recently she is focused on the topic of rational and irrational aspects of healing, irrational beliefs and magic, and gender stereotypes in the context of artistic creativity.

Benjamin Tejero’s work during his residency at Artport focused on the city of Tel Aviv, its gay life, and the contradictory reputations of the “bubble”.
The Exhibition Back To Artport will be showing during the open studio.

A talk by Tuçe Erel, Artport’s curator in residence, on artist run spaces and collectives.
Tuçe will discuss artist-run-space models as an alternative way of interdisciplinary collaboration and co-existing in a space. She will present Top e.V. and TopLab, in which she is a partner, as well as a brief background about artists-run-spaces in Turkey.

Join us for an artist talk with Artport’s Slovak artist in residence Ján Šipöcz (MeetFactory Exchange Program, Prague)

During the talk Šipöcz will present previous works and discuss his new project developed in Israel, exploring the memories that arise from marks left behind by the wrapping of public library books. Šipöcz deals with the medium of photography, inspired by personal and collective memories.

Joanna will discuss her photographic, filmic and performative practice that investigates man-made environments and domestic spaces in relation to self-protection and psycho-physical relationships.

Eva Riebová, curator of the Galleries at MeetFactory and Lucia Kvočáková, curator of the AiR program, are going to present activities and focus on MeetFactory and its position in the specific context of the Central European contemporary artistic scene.

Jean Blaise, curator and artistic director of Nantes, transformed the city into a lively international urban center through the development of art and cultural projects in the public space.
Blaise broadened the curator’s work, from common exhibition spaces to the outdoor urban space, making art an indispensable part of the city life.
Blaise will discuss the decisions and steps that paved the way to the transformation of Nantes, and the challenges to preserve these changes.

* The talk will be in French with consecutive interpretation to Hebrew

In collaboration with Mama Productions

Artist Olga Kisseleva, Head of International Art & Science Institute and Professor of contemporary art in the Sorbonne University, will talk about EDEN (Ethics-Durability-Ecology-Nature), a project she has been developing in her laboratory since 2016.

EDEN represents an artistic utopia assuming that extinction, despite its supposedly definitive and irreversible characteristics, can be revoked thanks to the advancement of contemporary human civilization. The project takes the experience and the information from the scientific research and transforms it into an artistic proposal allowing humans to fully comprehend the experience of plants. The resulting artwork constitutes the ultimate expression of scientific exploration by the translation of data into an experience which humans can immerse themselves into, and understand what the trees communicate with their environment.

In Israel Olga Kisseleva conducted the project EDEN on disappeared and endangered native species from the Negev area in collaboration with CNRS, Arava Institute and the Bar Ilan University Archeobotanical Laboratory. Her exhibition Listening to Trees across the Jordan River presents this research in the Negev Museum of Art since December 19 2019.

Image: Ancestrofuturismo, 2018 Guarana, copaiba, andiroba, cipo miraruira and cipo unha de gato, Amazonian endangered plants, Brazil. Photo: Olga Kisseleva

Join us fro an open studio and goodbye drinks from Jordan Nassar, and the opportunity to see “Jaffa”, the new body of works he created during his residency at Artport.

Jordan Nassar is an Palestinian-Polish-American artist from New York City who works with traditional Palestinian and European embroidery techniques, addressing the intersection of craft, language, history, (geo)politics, and technology. His work examines subjects such as cultural heritage, ownership, exchange and absorption; emigrant nostalgia for the ‘homeland’ and its generational repercussions; geography, politics, and orientalism; symbology, codes and language systems; superstition and religious belief; post-internet visual language; and representational and geometric abstraction. He also makes self-published artist’s books and zines.

VJ Live! Gilad Ratman & Shay-Lee Uziel
Free Entrance!

Gabi Kricheli (Artport’s artist in residence), Avi Sabah and Pesah Slabosky have been performing together since 2009 as Ohtoh Olam Trio. Nothing is planned in their performances, and they can be considered more of a conversation between artists and their instruments, rather than music performances. Together they create an experimental show that is created to the same beat that breaks it.

Artport, Bezalel MFA and Hamidrasha postgraduate program invite you to a Futurological afternoon with Julieta Aranda, Mareike Dittmer and Hili Perlson.

Featuring Tarot reading within the realm of the 9th Futurological Congress.

An artist talk by Artport’s resident Filip Pagowski. Filip will introduce his father Henryk Tomaszewski’s graphic oeuvre followed by the presentation of his own work. His father’s segment will consist of a show of his work, mostly posters, with some book covers, illustrations and satirical drawings, starting in the mid 1940s and continuing till the early 1990s. He will present the social, historical and political meaning of that time period in Poland and how it influenced, or not, the work and creative process of the leading member of the so called Polish School of Posters.
It will be followed by presenting Filip’s own path within the graphic arts world, its ups and downs and its geography: America, Europe and Asia

Artport and The Petach Tikva Museum of Art are pleased to invite you to the book launch of Guy Goldstein’s artist book Once, a Bit, a Second Hit, published on the occasion of his solo exhibition (curator and editor: Drorit Gur Arie).

Life performance of songs from the project at 9pm, special guest: Nitzan Horesh

The project, which includes a record and a the three-channel video installation, was created during Goldstein’s residency in Northern Ireland, addressing the violence and strife-ridden environment and the local “color” of life in it.

Ofer Grunwald is an international bonsai artist, operating with a groundbreaking approach in this unique artistic field. Aside his extensive work with traditional bonsai, Ofer focuses mainly on the development and interpretation of this field as a new medium for local-contemporary ways of expression.

Ofer will discuss the different notions of Japanese traditional arts – the philosophies, techniques, aesthetics and worldviews – and the ways in which they serve as inspiration for contemporary artistic creation.

A Conversation with Jessica Hodin, manager of Art Basel’s crowdfunding initiative. The Art Basel’s Crowdfunding Initiative is a creative partnership with Kickstarter, recruiting nonprofit organizations from around the world and coaching them on building crowdfunding campaigns for Art Basel’s curated page on Kickstarter. Jessica will discuss her experience in art crowdfunding, gaining awareness for your projects and connecting with local and international audiences.

Jessica Hodin received her BA from Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) with a major in Art History and holds a Master’s Degree in Art Business from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art (New York). For three years she was with the Winston Art Group focusing on sales strategy, placing her clients’ artworks in the ever-changing markets to achieve maximum returns. From 2013-2014, she curated and directed the Bleecker Street Arts Club (www.bsacny.com) in Manhattan’s West Village. Currently, Jessica manages Art Basel’s Crowdfunding Initiative, a creative partnership with Kickstarter, recruiting nonprofit organizations from around the world and coaching them on building crowdfunding campaigns for Art Basel’s curated page on Kickstarter. She continues to advise clients with respect to art acquisitions and pursue independent curatorial projects.

João Laia’s talk addresses art as a site where social dynamics can be examined, framing curating as a speculative communication tool, which employs the institution as a forum for debate and research. It also presents a conception of exhibition making as a verbal and non-verbal discursive practice, employing a grammar built out of the cross-contamination between artwork and physical space.

19:00-21:00 – lots of surprises by Artport’s Residents:

Performance by Michal Baror and Patrick Hough

Polaroid portraits by David Adika

Handmade door Signs by Toony Navok

Personalized Lucky Talismans by Elad Rosen

Gummy bears

Ice cubes

And more!

21:00 to the small hours of the night – Outdoor Karaoke and a Dance Party

Join us on Tuesday, December 23, for a talk with the Norwegian artist Lars Laumann. Laumann, who is staying at Artport’s residency program in collaboration with Bezalel’s MFA program, will be screening some of his recent works and discuss them with the audience.

Celebrating International Women’s Day by adding more women artists to the Hebrew Wikipedia.

As part of the International Art + Feminism Initiative and in collaboration with Wikimedia Israel, Artport is pleased to be participating for the third time, for a day of content writing on female artists.

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In the program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new values, translating existing values ​​into Hebrew, and also tea, cookies and oranges.

The workshop will be successful and we will add a lot of knowledge to Wikipedia, some preparation needs to be done in advance.

Very important before the workshop –
1. Open a Wikipedia user
2. Bring a laptop (if we haven’t – we’ve updated it beforehand and we might be able to help)
3. Think about what value an artist you want to write or translate in search of materials in advance
4.Sign up for link so we know you’re coming and send you all the details and updates

Composer and musician Yossi Mar Chaim will talk and about the importance of Morse Code in his work and will demonstrate the translation of Morse code to sound.

In conjunction with the exhibition Ax Bear Crow

During Gabi Kricheli’s exhibition In Disbelief, we will hold performances by the musician Kinoro Shel Rothschild, who had taken a part in the video that is part of the exhibition.

Dates:
Saturday, September 21st, 9 pm
Saturday, October 12th, 9 pm
Saturday, November 11th, 9 pm

Georg will introduce his work, which lies somewhere between visual and performing arts. He will take us on a journey where economic matters become narrations, and where performance has an artistic and monetary value.

Tanya Habjouqa, award winning photographer, artist and educator based in East Jerusalem, in conversation with Maya Benton, international photography curator based in NYC.

The talk will be held in English.

Born in Jordan and educated in the United States, Tanya Habjouqa resides in East Jerusalem and is a member of NOOR. A photographer, artist, and educator—her work stems from long-term investments and collaborative methodology, blending ethnographic research and investigative reportage. Examining details of conflict in the Middle East, Habjouqa addresses the presentation of these conversations by western media outlets.
In recent years, her projects have been commended by the likes of TIME, Smithsonian and World Press Photo. Habjouqa is known for producing sensitive work underscored by the absurd.
She is a mentor for the Magnum Foundation initiative, “Arab Photography Documentary Program” and teaches workshops internationally. She is trained in journalism and anthropology with an MA in Global Media with emphasis on Middle East Politics from University of London SOAS. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She is represented by East Wing and Ilex galleries.

Maya Benton is a museum curator, art historian, and art critic based in New York City. She has organized numerous international traveling exhibitions, lectures widely, and is a frequent contributor to magazines and museum catalogs where she writes about photography, museums, and material culture.
Maya has held positions in museums for twenty-five years, including The Getty Museum, The RISD Museum, The Harvard University Art Museums, the Jewish Museum of Florence, Italy, and the Jewish Museum of Venice, Italy. From 2008 to 2019, Maya was a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she established a major archive and organized the most widely traveling exhibitions in ICP’s history.
Maya recently organized an exhibition of photographer and filmmaker Gillian Laub’s contemporary images of racial segregation in the American South, Southern Rites, that will travel through 2024. She is the founder and director of the Jews and Photography Initiative, a non-profit collaborative of more than two hundred international curators, archivists, interdisciplinary academics and critics who are interrogating the unique contribution of Jews to the history of the medium of photography.
She is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard University, the University of Florence, Italy, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

http://tanyahabjouqa.com/

Invested in art and theory, Daria Kravchuk, Moscow-based curator, museologist and art journalist is currently pursuing her curatorial research at Artport Tel Aviv residency program. Her recent curatorial practice focuses on the topics of re-framing museum collections, rethinking «the everyday», researching projects that are conceptual, interventionist, contextual, socially engaged and locally involved.

Part of her on-going research is the theme of “Museum in the City and City in the Museum”, which on one hand opens up questions related to cultural policies that affect the emergence of new formats of art institutions, and on the other – analyzes the interconnection between the urbanization processes and artistic practices, which are mirroring these developments

Image: Zory by Nicholas Grospierre

As part of the International Art + Feminism Initiative and in collaboration with Wikimedia Israel, Artport is pleased to be participating for the third time, for a day of content writing on female artists.

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In the program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content, translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew, and also music and strawberries.

Starting with tiny movements and awkward gestures Diana Tamane is following long roads from the East to the West of Europe and her family members are often the main characters in her work. Sometimes it is her grandmother, who became a smuggler by trying to cross the Latvian/Russian border with two small pots of flowers. Or it is her dad, who since mid 90’s makes travels frequently to the West to buy cars, electronics and other items to resell it in Latvia. Or her mom, who became a truck driver after her enterprise went bankrupt several years ago. Often she uses vernacular photography taken by my family members exposing kitsch aesthetics of the working class, whose tastes are generally considered insignificant and worthless by the cultural elite. Through narratives of her family she wants to show different social processes and movements of today, creating a portrait of the contemporary society.

Savannah will present Friends with Books’ history and mission in relation to artists’ books as well as her curated art installations and exhibitions in connection to the fair. The talk will also relate to the independent art publishing scene in Israel, inviting Israeli artists to share and discuss a recent artist book.

Red wine, chocolate and a conversation between artist Rudolf Samohejl and curator Savannah Gorton on sculptural situations.

Rudolf Samohejl (*1987, České Budějovice, Czechoslovakia) lives and works as a visual artist and collaborator between Prague, the Czech Republic and Brussels, Belgium.

Rudolf Samohejl works in a variety of mediums, from installation and film to sculpture, drawing and performance. In his multifaceted work, layers of history, urbanism, capitalism, social narrative and identity become source material for explorations into the increasing possibilities and problems that new technology and visual languages possess over the construction of subjectivity.

The core of his current work can be found in the human obsession with an abstract future and the obsessive desire to project itself onto this imagined existence.

Samohejl graduated from the Academy of Art Architecture and Design in Prague. During his studies he took part at Salzburg Summer Academy and Edinburgh College of Art. He also participated in AIR Sandnes (Norway), Flow East Art Hub Prague, INI Project Prague, Space Called Place Organization Krakow (Poland) and Egon Schiele Art Center (Český Krumlov). His work has been exhibited in the Czech Republic and abroad since 2010. Rudolf Samohejl won the Jan Naaijkens Prize 2015 in the Netherlands and was a finalist of ESSL Art Award in 2013.

Loic Tallon in a conversation with Dr. Lior Zalmanson, founder and artistic director of the Print Screen festival, as part of the symposium Art and Museums in the Post-Digital Age, about the changing demands of museums in the digital age, the changing roles of digital and technology departments in museums and the growing use of web technologies and virtual and augmented reality applications inside the gallery premise. How should we make museum experiences more accessible to a new generation and global internet cultures?

Free Entry*

The event will take place at Print Screen Festival: Holon Mediatheque, Hall 1, Golda Me’ir St 6, Holon

Loic Tallon is a guest of the GLAM Wikimedia conference. The talk is in collaboration with Artport Tel Aviv.

*Please note that the entrance is free of charge for this event only.

For information and tickets for other events at Print Screen Festival: https://www.english.printscreenfestival.com/talks

We are thrilled to invite you to the book launch of Yaara Zach’s artist book Lay Low.

The book was published in conjunction with Zach’s solo exhibition Unreasonable Doubt at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art (closing Sep. 29th 2018)

Book Design by Avigail Reiner

With Nicola Trezzi and Hadas Maor

Music performance by Eran Zur

Photograph: Tal Nisim

In an era where the means to control and power-over, have become sub-visuals: debt derivatives, DNA manipulations, algorithms, metadata, and so on, the curatorial part is required to challenge the political reality sub-visual power with visuals means.
Therefore, questions about representation alternate with demo strategies. Before the model and the platform, lay two key terms in the digital world: Simon will offer the exhibition, the basic curatorial gesture, as a site in which relativity can be exemplified and experienced.
Simon will discuss the ideas that guide his new book “Metastability” and the ways in which curatorial practice produces knowledge that can be used in other fields beyond art exhibitions.

Dr. Yehoshua Simon, former Director and Curator of Moby Bat Yam Museum, is a Fellow at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New School New York, and Fellow at the World Academy of the Arts, Cologne. Also, Simon is Editor and Publisher of ‘Ma’ayan’, ‘West’ and ‘New and Evil’.
His book “Neo-materialism” was published by Sternberg Press (2013), the book he edited with Ingo Nireman “Anonymous Communists” (“Solutions” series, Sternberg Press, 2018), published in the Year, and the book “Being Together First to Be” (Archiv Box, 2018 ), 2019, as a summary for the exhibition program initiated and curated by “The Children Want Communism” (2016-2017). Simon holds a Ph.D from the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, London.

In these days of post reality, curator Anissa Touati, joined by French artists Lucille Uhlrich and Julien Lacroix, will try to push the boundaries of reality in a performative conversation between real life and fake characters, involving art and literature, avatars and pseudonyms.

The event will become part of a book published by Collection Verticales Gallimard, one of France’s leading publishing houses.

Anissa Touati b. 1982 is an exhibition maker, independent curator and Chalet Society’s co-director based between Mexico and France. Touati has realized numerous exhibitions in unusual places from public spaces, disused buildings to outdoor sites. She tries to forge links and interactions between artists and the exhibition space. Touati also independently co-organized exhibitions at galleries such as «¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? « at Galerie Perrotin (Paris), and organized at OMR Gallery «Made by 4 hands» (Mexico) and at institutions such as Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico city she curated the solo show of Jesper Just titled «Coordenadas».

Derek Fordjour’s images draw upon a variety of sources, including sporting imagery, board and card games, carnival motifs, and the circus to explore ideas of vulnerability. He uses the economic, political and psychosocial implications of games to discuss the power structure that exists around rewards and sanctions, merit and punishment, for both the player within the game and as an allegory for the broader human experience. Team dynamics that evoke the tension of an individual situated within a collective effort, convey the seductive sense of the risks and rewards that are inherent in the drama of both games and life.

https://derekfordjour.com/

Derek Fordjour’s stay in Israel is a collaboration between Artis and Artport.

We are thrilled to invite you to the book launch of Nevet Yitzhak’s artist book Video Works.

An afternoon of video, music, Cava and strawberries

With live improvisation by Assif Tsahar alongside Schneckentempo – a video concert by Nevet Yitzhak.

A talk with Artport’s artist in residence at the exhibition “KEDEM-KODEM-KADIMA” at the CCA, in collaboration with The French Institute, Tel Aviv.

With the support of Fondation Jacqueline de Romilly under the auspices of Fondation de France.

Chourouk Hriech is a French artist of Moroccan origins, working primarily with monochrome or black and white two-dimensional drawings, as well as installations, videos and photo-montages. Her drawings create some spaces not by empirical reality, but, though many build upon recognizable elements of actual places. The often surreal nature of these images interacts with notions of mapping, mobility, social fictions and how humans can found some solutions for live into the contemporary world with the ecology, the architecture.
A large number of her drawings is dedicated to the city of Paris and the landscape’s mutation around the constructions of the Tramway.
Hriech’s work has been shown at institutions including: Mamco, Genève, Suisse / MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, France / 8ème Biennale de Shanghai, Musée de Shanghai, Chine / Kunstnernes hus, Oslo, Norvège / 9eme Biennale de Marrakech, Projets parallèles, Maroc / Musée d’art contemporain Marseille, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France / Cìrculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Espagne, Musée d’art contemporain et Musée Cantini, Marseille,

Born in Bourg-en –Bresse in 1977, she lives and works in Marseille, teaches drawing at the superior art school of Marseille.
Currently represented by the Galerie Anne-sarah Bénichou in Paris (France) and the Atelier21 Galerie, in Casablanca (Morocco).

Artist talk with Artport resident TUNCA (Istanbul) at the exhibition “Table Manners” at the University Art Gallery.

In conversation with the exhibition’s curator Nirith Nelson and Artport’s director Vardit Gross, followed by Dillek’s famous Turkish water bourekas!

Tel Aviv University, The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts

The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Michel Kikoïne Foundation

Celebrating Artport’s last week at 55 Ben Zvi Road, as we leave the site that has been more than a home for the last five years. We hope to invite you soon for a housewarming party at Artport’s new location!

You are invited to join an informal conversation at the Artport studios with artist Marissa Lee Benedict (b. 1985. US). Benedict has been in residence at Artport since June as part of a new international exchange program with the Hyde Park Art Center’s Jackman Goldwasser Residency. She will present a brief presentation on her current research into the parallels between Israeli and California infrastructure as related to water management and drought resistant technologies. Benedict will be producing sculpture and video installation works on these topics that will be presented in the next year at Bert Green Fine Art (Chicago, IL) and The Renaissance Society (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL).

Gallery talk with Artport’s artists in residence Gabi Kricheli ,Lihi Turjeman, Yaara Zach, Dror Daum, Gili Avissar, Fatma Shanan.

NonFinito 2017 is not only the ending moment of Artport’s fifth year residency program, it is also the end of an era. It is the last exhibition at Artport’s gallery on 55 Ben Zvi Road. With its conclusion, Artport will leave the compound on the way to its new location, and the whole area will be destroyed as the first step in becoming a new neighborhood in south Tel Aviv.

NonFinito isn’t a year end show – it is an opportunity to see projects that were created during the residency year. The current show couldn’t disregard the “end”, a notion that was present from an early stage of the residency year, and some of the projects deal with this issue and with the options it entails.

Screening of the documentary film “Happily Forgotten”, the story of Asher Feldman, an unrecognised Israeli painter, and his daughter Lola, who tries to revoke his anonymity after his death.

Free Entrance, screening will take place in the gallery.

* The film is in Hebrew with no subtitles

Screening of the film “Eva Hesse”
Free Entrance, screening will take place in the gallery

The story of Eva Hesse could provide material for at least a dozen (mostly dark) documentaries. This one, made 45 years after her death, focuses on the inner strength and creativity that led her to use the personal drama of her own life to become one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Born in Germany during the “Years of Horror,” as a three-year-old Hesse was smuggled out at the last minute on a Kindertransport and placed in a monastery. At ten, she lost her mother to suicide. Talented and beautiful, she became a super star in the New York art scene of the 1960s, by shattering the barriers between her personal life and her art, and living constantly on the edge. This film is based on her personal diaries, which she kept religiously until her death at 32.

Director: Marcie Begleiter
Production: Karen S. Shapiro, Michael P. Aust
Production Company: Bdks Productions
Editing: Azin Samari
Cinematography: Nancy Schreiber
Research & Soundtrack: Karen Shapiro
Music: Andreas Schäfer, Raffael Seyfried

Docaviv Festival 2016

As part of the International Art + Feminism Initiative and in collaboration with Wikimedia Israel, Artport is pleased to be participating for the third time, for a day of content writing on female artists.

Wikipedia has become a major source of knowledge, though when looking for information about personalities in Hebrew, less than 20% are about women. The Art + Feminism initiative aims to change just that, and write history together as we want to read it.

In the program: Getting to know Wikipedia and learning basic rules, writing new content and translating existing texts ​​to Hebrew.

The Empire Remains is a long-term project by Cooking Sections that explores the imaginaries that were set up by the British Empire to promote food trade between home and overseas territories. The project attests how global desire, geopolitics, power and food networks have evolved from the beginning of the 20th century until today. In order to understand the making of natures and economic landscapes, such as the “tropical” or the “middle east”, it traces rum, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, “exotic” fruits, and spices throughout the world.

In 2016 Cooking Sections will open The Empire Remains Shop in London. Taking the original Empire Shops as a reference, the Empire Remains Shop will function as a research-store hosting a public programme of exhibitions, installations, performances, screenings, tastings and events. These new, specially conceived interventions will employ food as a tool to assemble new geographies, borders, sovereignty, global networks and economic alliances. At the same time, it will explore spatial approaches to origin, destination and environmental trade between the present and future of our postcolonial planet. The visitor will be invited to either taste edible maps, consume products, or participate of the ongoing conversations that will constantly change throughout the life of The Empire Remains Shop.

Following their 6 weeks residency in Artport Cooking Sections invites visitors to discuss together some of the work and projects they have worked on while tasting some of the process leading up to the Empire Remains Shop.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) are spatial practitioners based out of London. Their practice was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was selected for OFFICEUS, the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Their work has also been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; dOCUMENTA(13); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; CA2M, Madrid; Fiorucci Art, Trust London; The Politics and Pleasures of Food, ACC Weimar; SOS 4.8, Murcia; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR, Kortrijk; and have been 2014 residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They have recently been recipients of the 2015 Jumex Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo research grants. Their work has been published by Sternberg Press, Lars Müller, Punctum Books, and several international magazines and journals, like Volume, Domus, 2G, The State, Zawia and Utopia amongst others.

In the last weekend of June Natalia Zourabova, resident artist, invites you to shop around in a market of drawings and other art works. “Hashulchan” (“The Table”) will be open for a very short time- only for three days will Natalia open her drawers full of pieces from different time periods to sell them at special prices.

Sometimes we encounter situations where daily routine collapses, and within those situations one might proactively perform in order to exist. Artist Fang Lu call this state, which is characterized by the necessity to behave and perform in abnormal circumstances, “situated reality,” since through the irruption of daily logics and pragmatism, one’s consciousness emerges and heightens. The creation of these peculiar moments in art brings the possibility and joyfulness of the unknown. In her talk Fang Lu will discuss and present some of her video projects to expand from this idea.

This one-day conference will include contributions by curator and producer Vardit Gross, artists Agnieszka Kurant and Miri Segal, editor Nicola Trezzi, and curator and philosopher Avi Lubin.

Trying to avoid a specific position, the conference will gather conflictive positions as well as disparate points of view, trying to understand and decode our current reality in which digital technology and capitalism seem to have created a flirtatious and interestingly dangerous marriage.

Using the field of visual art as a study case, each participant will contribute with a lecture that will highlight several possible interpretations of the aforementioned reality: from the power of social networks in contemporary art to how artists are investigating the notion of immaterial capital; from artworks that function as “big data miners,” to how the art system is reacting to the digitalization and dematerialization of its own fabric.

Taking its title – “Phantom Capital” – from a term coined by artist Agnieszka Kurant, this conference is the culmination of several conversations and common interests within the leadership of Artport Tel Aviv, Bezalel Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and The Postgraduate Fine Art Program at Hamidrasha. Furthermore, it premieres a unique collaboration between these three institutions, which exist to support art-making and to empower artists in order to give them tools to achieve their goals, realize their dreams and fulfill their desires.

Agenda

9:30–10:00am Gathering and coffee

10:00–10:30am Introduction by Nicola Trezzi

10:30–11:15am “Never Mind Big Data,” by Miri Segal

11:15am–12:00pm “Phantom Capital,” by Agnieszka Kurant

12:00–12:45pm Lunch break

12:45–1:30pm “Social Power” by Vardit Gross

1:30–2:15pm “On the tip of my finger,” by Nicola Trezzi

2:15–2:30pm Coffee break

2:30–3:30pm Roundtable with Vardit Gross, Agnieszka Kurant, Miri Segal

and Nicola Trezzi, moderated by Avi Lubin

The Conference is free and open to the public

All sessions will be held in English

Artport is happy to host a special event with artist, Shuka Glotman, following the release of his two new artist books. During the evening, excerpts from the books will come to life and the audience will be able to participate in constructing a new unique narrative.

Invoking multiple histories of conversation, which have taken place around kitchen tables the world over, the residents at Artport invite you to join us for an evening of drinks, soup and discussion about the desire to think of art as a useful tool vs. the autonomy of art.

Art is usually squeezed between two opposite expectations: to be free on the one hand and socially relevant on the other. In this kitchenette, we will propose conflictual aesthetics, one that helps crossing this binary. Embarking from the painting of the Louvre in ruins we will touch upon historic and current uses of the museum and the role of the artist in the service of existing power or upcoming struggle. If the museum is a place of sleeping conflicts, the question will be how to kiss the struggle awake.

The evening’s speakers:

Oliver Marchart, Professor of Sociology of Art, Düsseldorf Art Academy

Nora Sternfeld, Professor for Curating and Mediating Art, Aalto University, Helsinki

Dana Yahalomi, Director of Public Movement

The discussion will be held in English

They’ve been saying that Painting is dead, asked what is it good for, pushed it out of the galleries – but painting is still here, as strong as it has always been.

The New Barbizon are committed to finding a pictorial language that suits what they see, that fits to the spirit of our times. In the last month they were working at Artport with German artist Mandy Kunze, who’s currently a resident at Artport, and were examining together the limits of painting and its meaning in our era. Please join us for an open studio and a discussion about painting, colors and plein air.

The artist talk can often feel stale, hierarchical and one-sided, with the artist on a pedestal and the audience as plebeians. Join Todd Shalom in an artist talk that will involve active audience participation, and of course, some walking. Todd will talk about Elastic City, the participatory walks organization he started in 2010 and together, using techniques from various walks, the audience will respond poetically to the immediate environment around Artport.

About Todd Shalom:

Todd Shalom works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. He is the founder and director of Elastic City. Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit. Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks for the public, often using sensory-based techniques, reinvented folk rituals and other exercises to investigate and intervene with the daily life of the city, its variously defined communities, and the politics of individual and group identity.

Works by Todd Shalom

Disruption, a new documentary film premiering worldwide on September 21st weekend, features some of the environmental movement’s top leaders, and calls for a new strategy to address the climate crisis: a public movement and uprising that forces world leaders to replace rhetoric with action.

The world premiere of Disruption in New York City is the flagship for hundreds of screenings taking place around the world on Sunday. The screening will be followed by a discussion.

Context hacking transfers the hackers’ objectives and methods to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent. In a metaphoric sense, these relationships also have a source code. Programs run in them, and our interaction with them is structured by a user interface. When we know how a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture or a media or political practice functions, we can change it and »recode« it, deconstructing its power relationships and emancipating ourselves from its compulsions and packaging guidelines.

Johannes Grenzfurthner’s workshop wants to present various tricks and practices from fields like theatre, activism, games and political intervention that help to improve artistic practice.

The workshop consists of a lecture performance, followed by hands-on context hacking experiences in the cityscape.

Johannes Grenzfurthner is an award-winning artist, director, writer, and researcher.

He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He is founder of US-based movie production company monochrom Propulsion Systems, LLC.

He is head of “Arse Elektronika” (sex and tech festival) in San Francisco, “Hedonistika” (food tech festival in Montréal and Tel Aviv) and host of “Roboexotica” (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics) in Vienna.

He directed the dark sci-fi comedy “Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl” and is currently working on several other film projects (“Over Lunch”, “Sierra Zulu”, “Nothing To Hide”).

Johannes’ artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, subversion, science fiction and the debate about copyright and intellectual property.

Tania Bruguera, a Cuban installation and performance artist, will talk at Artport about her work including “Immigrant Movement International”, a long term ongoing project, and her use of manifestos as a form of art.

Join us for a screening of Born in Flames, the 1983 feature debut of American independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden. This iconic feminist science fiction film shot in quasi-documentary style investigates the fractured social landscape of New York City ten years after a widespread socialist revolution in the United States. A group of women band together to stem the rising tide of racism and sexism in this supposedly utopian society, which in turn increasingly places them under the watchful eye of the state.

Developed while in residence at Artport 2014, Visit Palestine: Change Your View will be presented alongside other works produced by Public Studio. Public Studio was founded in 2009, by filmmaker Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky who live in Toronto. Together, and often in collaboration with others, they produce large-scale film installations, public art works and other media works that are formed within a socially engaged practice.

Visit Palestine: Change Your View, is a travel agency that was launched by Public Studio running from April to May 2014. Through an intricate research process, the artists developed a series of tours to the West Bank for a variety of interested individuals from artist and curators to engineers. In explaining the purpose of this project, the artists state: “After many years of working across borders, we are often asked: “What is it like over there? How can you go back and forth? Aren’t you frightened? I would go, but as an Israeli, I can’t.” We felt the only way to actually reframe the general view of Palestine and to challenge misconceptions was to engage people in our art process in order to literally change their view. Playing on tourism as a nation-building project, we created a travel agency in our studio along with traditional advertising style posters that aim to seduce one into joining a tour . We then customized tours for individuals including traditional activities of tourism within the larger political tour.”

Noam Sandel, Matar Pershitz and Galit Criden graduated from the school of visual theater in Jerusalem. They live and work in Tel-Aviv.

Artists of performance and theater, creating works that are intended to be shown on a stage. As a group’ they are looking new spaces to perform at. Working in new platforms that aren’t intended to be used as a stage. In this evening, we will be presenting three new works, one from each artists, all will take place at the same space.

These works are in constant process of change and experimentation. They change from one performance to the next due to the conditions of the specific show.

Participants: artist Boris Oicherman, scientist Prof. David Avnir and designer Ido Bruno.

Invoking multiple histories of conversation, which have taken place around kitchen tables the world over, the residents at Artport invite you to join us for an evening of drinks, soup and focused discussion about the meaning of an experiment as an artwork.

The idea of “research” as artistic practice is not new, but recently it seems to undergo a revival: “PhD by practice” programs in art academies proliferate, interdisciplinary research projects are encouraged by funding organisations, the description of artistic process as a knowledge-production appears in writings, words such as “knowledge” and “experiment” appear more in the artistic jargon. And yet, when applied to arts, the term “research” is extremely elusive and ambiguous, and the reactions of artists to it can be polar – from complete unacceptance, to declaring it to be an essential base of any meaningful practice.

Martin A. Schwartz, in the essay (http://goo.gl/MhJmBm) from which this Kitchenette borrows its title, talks about the “emotional need to discover” as the driving force of scientific practice. Is it essentially different from the one that drives artists in their practice? What would it mean for an artist to be “productively ignorant”? What kind of knowledge can be generated in arts – and what do we mean by knowledge in arts at all? How do we pose a question in art, or even – do we pose questions in art that worth answering? Or even more to the point – can we pose problems in art and aim to solve them? Do the development of practical academic research art programs on the one hand, and social artistic practices on the other, mean that arts undergo the transformation from being content-oriented to problem-oriented? To what extent the art institutions – galleries, funding bodies, museums, academies – are capable of accommodating open-ended artistic research projects aimed at producing “knowledge” and not “art pieces”?

In this Kitchenette we are hoping to open a discussion about the meaning and implications of artistic research. The topic has numerous academic and philosophical implication, but here we would like to focus on the artistic practice: what does it mean for an artist to do a research?

The conversation will be initiated by brief talks of three speakers – the scientist Prof. David Avnir; the designer Ido Bruno, and the artist Boris Oicherman, who will introduce stories that illustrate the potential of research in their spheres of activity, and the importance of “stupidity” and “productive ignorance” in it. We invite anyone interested to take part.

19:00: “Turn Aside” – a work in progress: a new sound installation by Boris Oicherman, Eli Nelken and David Avnir.

19:30: “The Great Learning – Paragraph 7” by Cornelius Cardew is a vocal composition, a musical-acoustical experiment for a choir and the listeners. The Modern Ensemble of the department of new music of Musrara and Dan Weinstein will perform this canonical piece in the Artport gallery space together with the sound installation “Turn Aside”, and will call the listeners to join in to create a singular musical piece.

The term “Site Specific” became over-used in the artistic jargon to the point of almost losing meaning. My own interest in it arises from my general interest in processes and mechanisms of learning: how do we gain knowledge about the world, as individuals and as society. I seek ways to put myself in situations of not knowing and having to “learn by doing”. For example, beginning with the unknown site, researching it, and producing work that is inseparable from the site. One consequence of this approach is re-thinking of the role and function of sites, and asking – what are they good for? why working in them? how artistic work is useful for them?

In the case of art exhibition sites, the question can be – how their function can be extended to have direct, tangible consequences outside of the artistic sphere?

The term “site” can be taken in a variety of meanings. A narrow one is a place, a location, a street corner, a room. A broader meaning of “site” can be an institution: a gallery, an art organisation, a city hall, a corporate company, a university. In the latter case the importance of the functionality of the site as an institution exceeds that of the physical site. The project “Turn Aside” merges the two: the site of the Artport gallery with that of the Faculty of Science of The Hebrew University in Givat Ram. The goal of my project in the university is to learn how collaborations between artists and scientists can lead to joint research projects that have consequences for both fields: how involvement of an artist can lead to new scientific knowledge, and how involvement of scientists can lead to new developments in arts. The goal of the project in the gallery is to learn how a its space can be turned into a platform for experimentation which is artistic and scientific at the same time.

“Turn Aside” is an experiment in doing experiments. Professor of neuroscience Eli Nelken, professor of chemistry David Avnir and Boris Oicherman will try to learn how to create an experiment by means of an artwork; how to set up an environment that will use the gallery as a site for a study that could not have been done without the non-disciplinary collaborative effort.

During the month of January Berlin based artist and Artport’s resident Jenny Bockmann has been following an 11 kilometer spiral around Tel Aviv.
Nine stations were marked in advance along the spiral route, in each the artist stayed for 3 hours, during which she kept a journal, drew, talked to passersby, and gathered findings, evidences, and different indexes that represent the nature of the place. Brockmann walks from one point to another like a portable laboratory of a scientific-cultural-sociological experiment. In order to achieve accurate findings, she is assisted by analogue and digital devices that measure objective environmental data, such as a distance-measuring device, test tubes, portable weather station, and a camera. The data she collects is translated into quick real-time drawings, maps, photographs, videos, and more. The devices represent the analytic and concrete information of the experiment, whereas the drawings, photographs, body gestures, and other activities that transpire as a result of a random encounter with a place, represent a subjective, emotional, and intuitive experience.
Join us to learn more about her poetic-archeological findings in an open studio and a conversation with curator Tali Ben Nun.

Participants: Leah Abir, Nicola Trezzi and Tea Tupajić

Moderated by Alhena Katsof

American artist Shimon Attie, who is currently taking part of Artport’s artists residency program, will present his work around the world, talking about the new project he is currently working on in Israel.

Attie’s projects invite the viewer to think about the relationship between space, memory and identity. Through photography, video, and projects exhibited in public sphere, he brings to life public sites by presenting their lost historical images, giving visual form to memory.
In the famous project “The Writing on The Wall” from the early 1990s, Attie projected on Berlin’s buildings photographs of Jewish life that existed before the Second World War. Recent projects have involved reviving private and public memories through multi-channel video and paperwork.
Most of Attie’s projects include strong engagement with local communities: In Israel he is working on a new photographic project that incorporates short texts in the public sphere.

Attie’s work has been exhibited and purchased by dozens of museums around the world, including the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Pompidou Center, the Miami Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and many others. In addition, Attie has won numerous awards and scholarships, including the Guggenheim Research Grant, the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and the Rome Award. And recently, Attie was awarded the Lee Krzner.

Many books have been written about Attie’s work and it has been documented in several films that have aired on PBS television networks, BBC ARD.

Art Port Tel Aviv and Lucie Fontaine are proud to present Fontaine, school of, a project that will take place in Tel Aviv in July 2013.

Lucie Fontaine will be in residence at Art Port Tel-Aviv in the summer of 2013. During her stay, she will establish a summer school inspired by the legacy of the artist’s “bottega” [workshop] in the Renaissance, an interesting time when figures like Giorgio Vasari redefined the notion of authorship and signature, and their positions in the field of visual art.

The school will take place in Tel Aviv during the month of July 2013 and the main goal is to break down the notion of authorship and signature. The title of the project “Fontaine, school of” mimics the way museums define and label anonymous painters who made artworks following the style of a famous artist, i.e. Caravaggio. Here the name “Fontaine” will be used in order to convey a multitude of voices, hopefully in constructive contrast with each other.
The school will be open to 15 international students – from Israel and abroad.

The faculty of Fontaine, school of includes curator Ory Dessau; artist Nahum Tevet; gallery owner Shifra Shalit; artist, food expert and Art Port resident Rafram Chaddad; artist and Art Port resident Einat Amir; curator Joshua Simon; journalist and curator Vardit Gross; artist Dor Guez; Public Movement and Public Movement leader, Dana Yahalomi; gallery owner Irit Sommer; and artist Joshua Neustein, among others.

Art Port Tel Aviv is an international residency program. Its aspirations are to be a home for emerging artists, a place that will be reflected upon as a meaningful milestone in the lives of talented artists, and to serve as a platform for an alternative artistic dialogue, between the local contemporary art scene, international organizations and independent artists worldwide.

Artist Tamara Moyzes will present two works in process:

“Gypsy Black Panthers in the Czech Republic – The First and Last Media Intifada in the Czech Republic” and “When Political Art and Activism Share the Same Practices
Popular art or artism?”

Tamara Moyzes’s works are characterized by political orientation. In her work she does not choose an academic approach but prefers a direct approach – she does not respond to reality from a distance but takes part in the story. The people featured in her fiction-like documentaries are not actors, and their “role” only highlights their situation.

Tamara uses a combination of documentary, pathetic and humorous scenes to reflect social controversies. The parody-like attendance of the various issues is a strategy that does not alleviate the situation, but on the contrary: it presents its explosive nature openly. Tamara Moyzes uses video as a political and tactical tool.

Masami grew up in Tokyo and graduated from Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo, where she studied Japanese traditional technic of dying and hand weaving. She currently lives in Reunion Island. She creates large scale site specific installation , often in nature, working with natural and copper fibers, as well as with painting and calligraphy. Her work touches issues relating to the fractured relationship between man and nature, reflecting hidden energies and forces that create and destruct. She works in the terrain between contemporary and traditional art.

Masami’s work is intuitive and process oriented. She responds to personal physical and mental processes she goes through when she inhabits a certain site. The resulting work is a pause in a process rather then a finished object. The installation is often reminiscent of a body, an elusive and delicate presence that searches for its place in an unfamiliar space. It is a strange intruder, but at the same time it seems as if it has always been there. Masami’s works speak in different tones then what we are used to in a western modernized society. They whisper and shout simultaneously, echoing ghosts of nature and humans, feelings of pleasure and pain.

In SelfObject Masami creates an installation for Artport Gallery, a personal and poetic work resulting from her 3 month stay in the residency. In psychology SelfObjects are external objects which are not experienced as separate and independent from the self, but complete it. They strengthen and structure the sense of self and are necessary for normal functioning. Unlike a self portrait in Art jargon, SelfObjects are not a representation of one self, but part of the place from which the self can develop and fulfill its selfness. The craft of the installation, a sort of obsessive weaving and cutting and folding, reflects an inner journey that responds to the intense space the artist encountered. In masami’s words, she was “breathing out a beautiful mess”.

DEMOCRATIC RAIN 01 – TEL AVIV is an open-source-installation on a public square and in the Internet. It invites all local and virtual passers-by to participate via their smartphones or computers, by answering the question: WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY MEAN TO YOU?

The RAIN consists of A4 sheets, free-falling from a CLOUD in the shape of a high-hanging-printer , to a public square in Tel Aviv. Each paper represents an individual answer that was sent via the website, in the days before the event and during the event itself in real time.
The event wants to re-explore the concept of democracy, and it’s manifestation in the street. It connects the virtual sphere, that has become the common arena of free speech, to the physical public space, which has lost it’s role as a place of assembly, dialog, debate and encounter.

The Project was developed by artist Omi Scheiderbauer with the artists at Artport TLV residency artists during a collaborative workshop.

Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will hold a public event at artport with Rafram Chaddad , one of the Israeli artists in our residency program 2012,

Tiravanija was invited to hold a master class to the group .

HOW NOT TO WORK / 2012 Rirkrit Tiravanija’s master class – Chellenged our artists to let go of expectations, perceptions, anticipations etc.

together they enjoyed precious and funny encounters with the public experiencing field trips and dinner events .