During his residency at Artport, Roy Menachem Markovich built a mobile studio. Nested within his actual studio, this scaled-down workspace is a utilitarian object, a self-contained, protected survival capsule, enabling the artist to continue working even amid catastrophe and disaster zones. At first glance, the structure conveys technological sophistication and a dazzling, high-end finish, yet a closer look reveals an improvised arrangement of accidental objects: salad spinners, an electric mosquito zapper, electric cables, and tin cans. It takes only a moment for the illusion of luxury to dissolve, exposing the fragile, wounded joints that hold the local reality together. 

Within the autarkic apparatus inside the box, the artist is confined and sealed off, protected and preserved, becoming the operator of a machine that produces miniature sculptures through acts of sawing, screwing, and gluing. The accompanying video follows the painstaking process of making, while tracing the studio’s continual transformation in both form and function: from a suffocating chamber to a fortified enclosure; from a surveillance device, activating cameras mounted on a rotating mop head, to a water cannon; from a place of refuge to an escape facility. All the while, the sculptures it produces are launched beyond the confines of the space. 

In a world saturated with 3D printers and artificial intelligence, where artistic production is becoming increasingly detached from human touch, Markovich clings to analogue matter. The studio becomes an impenetrable shell, an isolated domain in which the artist invents the rules and bends materials to his will, so as to continue creating in a turbulent world. Suspended between the fortified refuge and the dangers outside, Markovich holds up a mirror to the human desire for control; a heart-wrenching attempt to mend the rift, one that forever remains within the scope of “almost.” 

The work was produced during an Artist in Residence program at 25hours Hotel, Langstrasse, Zurich, supported and curated by Esther Eppstein, Madame l’Ambassadrice of the Message Salon embassy. 

Photo credit: Michel Gilgen 

For nearly three decades, a Coca-Cola billboard stood above the Falafel on HeAmal Street. Its red color had long since been eroded from its scarred façade, until it disappeared from the view of passersby and the building’s residents alike. For Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, the billboard is inseparable from news channels and commercial media, intertwined with the same economic interests and cross-ownership. Together, they produce a visual regime of capital, information, and desire. A sip of “the Taste of Life” (as per Coca-Cola’s Hebrew slogan) winds up the death drive, reproducing itself within an intense, sugar-coated media environment in which pleasure is dependent on concealing a reality of killing. 

A hidden mural is revealed behind the billboard: a four-meter-long red mullet. The “Manshiyya Red Mullet”—Sultan Ibrahim Dhak min al-Manshiyya (سلطان إبراهيم ذاك من المنشية: That sultan Ibrahim from Manshiyya)—swims in the present, amidst infrastructures of erasure and memory. Apart from the sign, Mizrahi collects traces of the annihilation processes taking place on the studio’s threshold, from the orchard workers’ housing to the walls of Artport. 

As reality is subsumed into a screen of images, propaganda, content, and advertising, Mizrahi traces the theological mechanisms of influence. He publishes satirical ads in the widely-read religious Zionist weekly Karov Elekha (Heb. very near you or “nigh unto thee”). Alongside opinion pieces proclaiming redemption through the destruction of Gaza, he places an advertisement of “Earplugs for insouciance,” resistant to “the cries of babies, screams of pain and guilt.” Echoing the Hebrew title of the landmark exhibition curated by Sarah Breitberg Semel, “The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art” (“But the word is very nigh unto thee”) as well as the title of the weekly itself—both derived from the biblical verse in Deuteronomy (30:14), which locates the divine sublime as well as moral action in close proximity—Mizrahi approaches that contiguity as a blind spot. The closer an object comes to the eye, the harder it becomes to see it; the nearest crime is concealed within the gaze itself. This cruel paradox turns proximity into an apparatus of estrangement: the closer things converge, brought together to the point of contact, the wider the abyss between them. 

The “Mad Scene” from the classical ballet Giselle (Adolphe Adam, 1841) embodies a painful existential conflict between Eros and Thanatos. It is centered on Giselle, a young woman whose unrestrained passion for dance stands in constant tension with her fragile health and weak heart. The betrayal of her beloved becomes the catalyst that upends her world, transforming the vitality embodied in dance into a destructive force. Giselle sinks into a trance-like dance, and within the rigid framework of classical ballet, she is gradually swept into a loss of control and madness. At the climax of the scene, the orderly language of dance gives way, and the passion for dance that kept her alive becomes the very force that ultimately leads to heartbreak, collapse, and death. 

Yasmin Davis seeks to capture the cyclical movement between control and disintegration. Inspired by Giselle, she transformed her Artport residency studio into a film set and constructed a spiral camera dolly that encircles the space. Davis is not merely the object being filmed; she is also the one controlling the camera—moving it, drawing it toward herself and away. The choreography that emerges between the body propelling the camera and the camera’s eye generates a cyclical motion that begins in taut control before gradually unravelling toward collapse. 

For Davis, dancing to the point of exhaustion becomes a metaphor for artistic practice, embodying the joy of creation alongside the threat of annihilation. While outside the sun rises and sets and the world bustles, the darkened studio functions as a protected, seemingly safe space, yet it is a deceptive sanctuary: the storm outdoors gradually seeps in, and artistic practice becomes a fortress where external tragedy and inner turmoil are woven together, inseparably. 

A black square on the wall. 

Kazimir Malevich sought the “zero of form”; to sever painting from the world, from the object, from the landscape, from narrative. 

The color black offered itself as a new point of departure, outside history. 

We can no longer see black innocently. 

Black has become saturated with time. Wars, destruction, death, loss, images that were etched into memory and disappeared, and images we can no longer stop seeing. What once sought to be pure abstraction now inevitably bears the immense weight of reality. 

The seven-branched menorah emerges from the darkness. An ancient sign. But it has legs. At any moment, it can run for its life. Where is it running? 

A curtain is drawn. Through a narrow opening, thousands of flickering suns burst forth, tiny flashes that can be grasped only fleetingly. The Galactic Peeping Tom. 

Light and darkness cease to be opposites. Darkness may reveal, light may conceal. What lies in plain sight is not necessarily what the eye sees, and what it sees is not necessarily what it knows. 

Faces appear from among cypress trees. A long finger rises to the lips: “Shhh.” Don’t tell anyone what you saw here. 

Paper pulp, plaster, pins, gemstones, and epoxy keep the images in a liminal space between ornament and talisman, between the artificial and the magical. Imagined galaxies, pearl tears, and a whispering snake momentarily resemble signs left behind by an ancient civilization that may never have existed, or may have existed in a haberdashery. 

The final scene of The Sopranos. Tony sits with Carmela and A.J. in the diner, while Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ plays in the background. Meadow runs toward the entrance. The bell above the door rings. Tony looks up. Black screen. 

For several years now, most TV channels have been caught in a single, unending broadcast. In contrast to the constant noise on the television screen at home, the television screen in Naama Roth’s work emits a bright white light, devoid of any image, like a promise yet to be fulfilled. On closer inspection, through its reflection on the floor, an image of destruction and devastation emerges—fire and smoke peering at us through layers of glass and artificial light. In the elusive space between the visible and the hidden, between optical illusion and reflected reality, the possibility arises that something else is taking place. 

The pristine white light is blocked by bars in the shape of a tree and flowers—an apparatus of policing and confinement disguised as innocent domestic decoration. The work’s materials—rust and concrete—are drawn from the real public sphere, bringing together construction and control with separation and destruction. Two female heads cast in concrete stand as silent sentinels, a monument serving as a post-apocalyptic testament and remnant. 

Conversing with the visual language of Ze’ev Raban, one of the founding fathers of the Bezalel style and of Hebrew design, Roth turns to an early moment, when the place was formulated through images of harmony, beauty, and promise. In Raban’s works, and as part of the visual language that developed around Bezalel, ornament and biblical sources took part in creating a visual fantasy of the Land of Israel: a space where nature, localism, spirituality, and nationhood converged to form an idyllic vision. In the current work, this image emerges as a distant echo, a remnant of a utopian dream transformed into a dystopian reality. 

Oree Holban’s works inhabit the charged terrain of “romantic dysphoria”—the feeling that the scripts of classic romance and clichéd coming-of-age films were never designed to accommodate bodies, identities, or complexities that lie beyond familiar conventions. Ache and a sense of estrangement are mediated through a saccharine-sweet veneer of vivid color and tenderness. His figure functions as a multimedia avatar appearing in oil paintings, songs performed in the artist’s own voice, and a mixed-media animation crafted from plasticine. 

The plasticine and Holban’s playful language serve as a soft armor, allowing him to navigate otherness within the familiar realms of infatuation: an amusement park, a sports field, or the beach. Much like Camp in queer theory, “cuteness” operates here as a strategy of vulnerability, a protective shell that beckons the viewer closer, making pain and self-searching approachable, almost inviting. 

The choice of a soft, malleable material that can be reshaped and remolded at any moment embodies the possibility of fluidity and transformation, turning the body itself into a site of self-creation. Through it, Holban’s figure occupies a dual vantage point, at once a participant in the scene and an onlooker. This “Two Times Oree” lives within a split consciousness that recognizes the romantic cliché from the outside, yet continues to claim a place within it, longing to take part in the game. 

The exhibition brings together a collection of historical and personal heartbreaks, including 18th-century painting, a dating app, and Tel Aviv’s Eden Cinema in a scene from the film Alex Is Lovesick. The obsessive monitoring of Instagram Stories becomes a perpetual search for validation and visibility; a desperate attempt to make sure that the person on the other side has indeed heard the song, is watching, and truly sees the one who is out there. Holban’s works offer an exposed translation of the yearning to be seen, to love, and to be loved, imagining a new world of romantic scripts written especially for him.