Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus are participating in the group exhibition ‘STRATA’, at Circle 1, Berlin, with their works: ‘Salt Dinner’, 2012; ‘Fossils’, 2014.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. Borrowing from archaeology, ‘STRATA’ delves into an array of associations or surfaces, while taking the liberty to explore fragments and particles without attempting or feeling the need to assemble them into a logical disposition. The show proposes to examine the syntax of a collagist composition through the cracks and interstices between the realistic and the fantastic, the religious and the secular, the ironic and the tragic, the pleasing and the painful, be it a one-off manifestation or an expanding narrative. Participating artists include: Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune and Robert Stieghorst.  

The work of Shahar Marcus and Nezaket Ekici, who in recent years have been collaborating on performance and video works, is rife with ritual and ascetic, symbolic and metaphysical acts, usually in desert settings against the backdrop of a primeval landscape. Their works raise questions about culture and religion, space and time, while blending collective memories and religious traditions with the unique, temporary and physical experience anchored in the here-and-now.

Their artistic collaboration reinforces the dependence between man and god, and between man and man, manifested in forces of attraction and repulsion, vitality and solace, interwoven with destruction, a unity of opposites in which death is revealed to be equal to life. Water and salt are key motifs in their video ‘Salt Dinner’ (3:16 min. 2012), in which the artists float in the Dead Sea, satisfying their hunger with an exhausting feast held upon the water. These elements, which are crucial to human existence, infuse their work with the excess of life and death as the gluttonous feast becomes a perverse parallel of the Last Supper.

In ‘Fossils’ (12:49 min, 2014), Marcus and Ekici operate in a desolate landscape in Halde Lydia Camphausen, Quierschied in Saarland, Germany. The artists collect slag as a residuum of coal and carry it to the place, where the coal originally came from into a cave. In order to become one with nature, they find their last place to stay in a bed, becoming fossils by being covered by black coal, the product of their labor.

Curated by Drorit Gur Arie

Circle1 – showroom