Re-Collection

In the exhibition “Re-Collection”, which extends over three halls and marks the 70th anniversary of Wilfrid Israel Museum, Nevet Yitzhak examines the relationship between the museum’s collection and the collector behind it. She constructs a new exegetic space, which combines historical and fictional elements. Yitzhak’s modus operandi deviates from the prevalent relationship between the artist and the museum, which the former regards as a space in which to exhibit her work. Yitzhak’s works in recent years, especially in video, animation, and installation, explore the cultural perceptions and values that shape the ways in which museum collections are formed and their role as agents of memory.
In this exhibition, Yitzhak conjures up Wilfrid Israel’s original collection from the darkness and oblivion. While presenting it, she frees the exhibits from the customary museum categories and operates in the intermediate space between the real and the imaginary. It is a mental twilight zone, where lingering enables one to expand and breach prevalent thought patterns. Yitzhak’s action reinstates the collection with the subjective, eclectic, unexpected dimension.
In the projected panoramic space created by Yitzhak, ancient figurines selected from the collection emerge from oblivion one by one, presenting themselves anew in a surprising manner as monumental sculptures in a mysterious public space. She magnifies their dimensions and presence via sharp, realistic, close-up photography, emphasizing their every detail. No longer small-scaled inanimate objects kept on a shelf in the museum’s storeroom and cataloged on a data card. Her work allows viewers to break away from all the layers of knowledge surrounding the sculptures, from the artistic style and the value we ascribe to them. It reshuffles the cards of artistic hierarchy and cultural-historical context, toying with the realms of imagination and fantasy concealed in the sculptures themselves.
In the dark space, Yitzhak creates a mysterious and mesmerizing panoramic arena of occurrence projected in dramatic black-and-white chiaroscural contrasts. Out of the darkness, a jagged wall is illuminated, extending over the entire space, cutting it in two. Within it, dark apertures and crooked windows open up, the shadows of smoky chimneys in the distance, steam sizzling from a red hot pit.
Her visual language echoes the absence, distortion, solitude, and alienation via sharp compositions.
The fine tension underlying Yitzhak’s work seems to draw the viewer to another dimension of existence, between wakefulness and dream. Yitzhak awakens the statuettes from their deep sleep. She does not necessarily choose the most outstanding of them, in terms of either beauty or intactness, but rather culls the broken, cracked, and glued. Her silent protagonists enjoy a brief moment of glory, which only reinforces their vulnerability. It is a kind of cabaret, whose manifestations alternate—at times they are poetic and melancholic, at others—macabre and grotesque. All of these raise skeptical reflections regarding the apparatuses for sorting, defining, and sanctifying cultural assets, which lend the sculptures their status. Yitzhak operates in the interstice between display, presentation, and representation. She introduces us to the rules of the game as well as the possibility of breaking them. We are the ones who furnish the exhibits with meaning, and we are also those who choose to believe in the authenticity of that meaning.
In Yitzhak’s current work, the collection’s sculptures emerge in a fictional public space. The potential for destruction materializing in them evokes shattered sculptures, raising questions about the power of art, the values it represents in the public space, and the political meanings it carries with it as a historical document, often indicative of the society that created it. The ancient sculptures from the collection look at us as a relic left from the longing for humanism and compassion. They are reminiscent, on the one hand, of the catastrophe scenarios that still threaten our existence, and, on the other hand, the indifference and numbness of the silent majority. The projected three-dimensional space makes the danger more real and challenges the viewers’ role as witnesses to the events.

Curator: Shir Meler-Yamaguchi