What is the Political is a group exhibition in which each participating artist was asked to choose one work of their own and another by a different artist, both of which they see as political. As the exhibition is being constructed, an open conference around the question of the political will take place, with the participation of artists and scholars from different fields. The documentation of this conference will accompany the exhibition, projected on screens along the round wall of the second floor of the museum.

Beyond the desire to delimit and to generate a closed, fixed definition of the political as an abstract idea, or, alternatively, to offer an illustration of the political through images, the exhibition is premised on the question of how the political is perceived by artists. The curatorial process examines the possibilities hidden in the realization of an exhibition that seeks to display a collection of private opinions, to expose affinities and connections between these opinions and members of the community who hold them, and to constitute a platform for the wide variety of ways in which the political can be imagined. By decentralizing the curatorial act and posing the question to the artists themselves, the exhibition proposes to approach the curatorial process as an open one that enables many voices to be heard.

This is a process that generates context without treating it as an absolute value. This kind of curatorial approach is premised on a temporary refusal to give voice to only one ideology. Instead, it is committed to rethinking the curator’s status as a sole auteur. The exhibition seeks to bring together numerous explorations and grapplings, to question the mechanisms of choice and their influence on representation, and to create an event wherein ideas can emerge out of random and ambivalent places. In its quest for the political, the exhibition does not aim to classify specific art as political, to map the politics of the art field, or to unfold an historical narrative of political images. It is a sincere desire to undermine reductionist schemes, to question the mechanisms of representation themselves, to present a search that does not meld ideas together but leaves them unchained. The assumption on which the exhibition is premised is that the political does not emerge from the artificial fusion of ideas but from the free affinities that are created, in this case, between different artists and works of art.

Artists: Boaz Oppenheim, Itai Eisenstein, Jehoshua (Shuky) Borkovsky, Avner Ben Gal, Arnon Ben David, Ronnie Bass, Dror Daum, Sharif Waked, Pavel Wolberg, Avdey Ter-Oganian, Sharon Yaari, Yitzhak Livneh, Francesco Finizio, Keren Cytter, Zoya Cherkassky, Andrew Kerton, Miki Kratsman, Roee Rosen and Gilad Ratman

Curator: Maayan Amir

25.11.2010 — 08.01.2011

Visit the exhibition page on moby.org.il