Somewhere Better than this Place

A moment before Braverman gallery copies her address to a new location, we open new exhibition: Somewhere better than this Place, which closes a continuous activity of three years in 81 Yehuda Halevi St., Tel Aviv.

Seven Israeli artists: Itamar Jobani, Dana Yoeli, Anna Yam, Reuven Israel, Eyal Sason, David Adika, and Romy Achituv, will exhibit works from the past years.

Following the name of the exhibition, Somewhere better than this Place(*), the show examines the conceptual and mental meaning of an ´´ideal place´´. Through the presented works; photography, installation, painting, sculpture and interactive video, questions of belonging, yearning and longing, strangeness as well as identity definition are raised.

The discussion about an ´´ideal place´´ can be seen in most of the works on an unconceivable utopia level, leaving the viewer in an expectation for a change.

Eyal Sasson will present a watercolor pencil drawing, as it was taken from a fantastic world like ´´Alice in Wonderland´´. A girl – woman in a rabbit custom, suggesting hidden erotic and sexual discomfort, reacts ironically to this enchanted world.

Although Anna Yam´s photographs apparently present a coincidental narrative, a strong sensation of self documentation can be traced: like freezing out through her camera lens a daily moment on Yekaterinburg lake shore. A continuous tension is felt on her work, in which the present presence is rephrased in terms of the passed time.

Dana Yoeli shows a Still life, large scale oil painting, full of symbolic objects: a crystal boll, a mask and flowers like chrysantems, star geyser and roses. Images like this function as magnetic fields, creating a relation ship of attraction and rejection, symmetry and catastrophe. This is a sentimental painting, exposing generating identity objects, a kind of allegories coming from memory traces.

Shekhina, Itamar Jobani´s installation, is a sculptural structure which corresponds with oriental decorative elements, constructing a temple of holiness. In the middle of the structure a video projection of a man performing a religious ritual can be seen. The transcendental experience contains within itself an almost erotic materialistic presence, which weakens the holiness of the work. This pseudo temple of holiness contains many inner contradictions (archaic versus technology, materialism versus spirituality and temple versus prison) and apparently opposes against the western spiritual experience of our times.

Reuven Israel´s sculpture, T.I (Treasure Island), a minimalistic sculptural structure made of M.D.F and painted with industrial painting, reveals a memory game of architectural structure or a familiar functional object shown as an artificial substitute to a real place. This game occurs both in a conceptual (name of work) and physical level (the object itself).

David Adika´s series of photos was taken during a four month residency in Barcelona, summer-autumn 2007. In which Adika documented the city, as a passing by tourist that finds him self in unknown places. Despite the ´´foreignness´´ of the place, from the local images presented on the work, a strong flavor of familiarity, softness and warmth can be felt.

Romy Achituv presents in the lower level of the gallery, BeNowHere, an interactive installation, composed of 12 one minute, 360 degrees, video panoramas, filmed at four cities, designated by UNESCO as endangered World Heritage sites: Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Angkor-Wat and Timbuktu.
Achituv´s work raises questions of belonging and atmosphere of wanderings.
Through a click on the digital mouse, the viewer is aloud to choose the presented image, as well as the hour of the day and the event direction within a close time unit (forwards and backwards). The interactive video project presents an active video window, which moves in to the width of the screen, and due to the experimental application, the possibility of separating and controlling independently the spatial and time components within the narrative space is achieved.
BeNowHere Interactive is the recipient of I.D. magazine design review award (1999).

(*) The name of the show Somewhere better than this Place, is taken from the work of the Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez, that was shown in 2000 at Serpentine Gallery, London.