In this respect, the works in it’sme are different: through a given moment, event or figure associated with the artist’s life, we remain in place rather than moving along the temporal or spatial axis. The participating artists also combine events from the familiar reality: references to the disengagement plan or an image which appears familiar, such as a family nursing its hospitalized son. Indulgence in the world, however, turns out to be a return to the self.

The works combine naïveté with awareness, biting irony with subtle humor. By employing diverse strategies, the artists introduce split, ephemeral, disguised and exhibitionist figures and personae while using various media: video, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. Alongside disguise, fantasy, humor, childization, striptease, and daring, the works appeal to private memory and mourning that struggles to retain or fashion some meaningful self-image.

The exhibition viewer moves through various sites in a man’s life: hospital, school, photo album, drawer, an adolescent’s bedroom, neighborhood, rented apartment, times of mourning, family celebrations, and dreams.

The diverse works in the exhibition all share a lack of center. The absent focus is replaced by diffusion and multiplicity: video or sculptural duplications, floor and wall installations whose compositions are devoid of a differentiated center, games of time, identity and figures, a series of photographs that freeze in a continuous moment, karaoke, and a live broadcast taking place here and there. As noted by English writer and essayist GK Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy (1908):

To the question, “What are you?” I could only answer, “God knows.” […] “whatever I am, I am not myself.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), p. 165

Joshua Simon and Dalia Levin
Curators of the exhibition

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