Be-Company Exhibition 2: POOL-KAN
Gilad Ratman, Michal Helfman, Tomer Rosenthal, Rotem Linial, Jesse Lockard, Kobi Swissa, Tamar Even Chen, Amit Tine, Flora Deborah, Olivia Hild, Haviv Kaptzon, Omer Sheizaf, Yoav Weinfeld
- premiere
- dance & performance
- installations
- group show
This Be-Company Exhibition is an intergenerational and multi-format event – a call to assembly issued to members of the local fine art community. The best minds of the local “swamp”, people who live here, will present: a dance ritual calling on us to continue broadcasting despite and through the current twilight time; a game that asks us to reconnect emotion and intuition to our knowledge of art history; and the launch of Fanzine which is itself an installation work and documentation of secret ceremonies that took place in the public sphere. The works, each in their own way, invite us to participate in the common space of the local art world, locate our fidelity to it, enjoy it and turn it all into an exhibition at MoBY.
This event includes a few works.
- FRI 1.7
19:30
MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam
120 min
The transmitter ceremony
Michal Helfman & Gilad Ratman
In 1993 “the voice of peace” ship sank across from the shore of Tel Aviv. The first “pirate” radio station was founded by peace activist Abie Nathan in 1973 and was broadcasting for 20 years.
The sun was setting down and the sky was painted deep red. thousands of music records are making their way to the bottom of the ocean. Among them, the iconic song “Twilight time” by the platters.
The Transmitter Ceremony is a weird creature appearing at twilight time, as a hybrid, it moves freely between a museum display and a live performance. The Transmitter Ceremony is a site-specific work, made in response to the Bat Yam Museum of art’s space.
Postcards
Tomer Rosenthal, Rotem Linial & Jesse Lockard
Postcards is an open-ended, turn-taking game. It comprises printed postcards drawn from museum collections around the world. The postcards present reproductions of a wide array of artworks and artifacts from around the world, ranging from contemporary art to archeological objects. The box-set includes over 200 postcards and a booklet with instructions and suggestions for a variety of gameplay.
At its core, Postcards is based on a seemingly simple act—the placing of images side-by-side. Players are invited to collectively create unique grid-composition layouts, playing from “hands” of postcards drawn by chance from the box-set. These layouts are generated over the course of the game, as players, in turn, make different visual connections between images based on composition, iconography, gesture, narrative, materiality, color, shape and other perceived affinities. The connections are inherently individual and unique to the specific moment of play and the dynamic of the playing group. They are expressive of the inner worlds and particular ways of thinking of the players themselves.
The final layout of cards becomes a sort of Tarot card spread or Rorschach test for the collective makeup of the group of players. The gameplay deliberately eschews the linearity of art historical narratives and traditional academic approaches to the study of visual culture. Postcards seeks to revive a sense of wonderment that arises at seeing artworks encounter one another—artworks separated by time and space, and which come together only through the act of play.
The game draws on the long history of the use of photographic reproduction in art history. For example, Le Musée imaginaire and the Museum Without Walls by Andre Malraux, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, David Hockney’s Great Wall and others. The game encourages close looking and observation. It develops intuitive and associative thinking, deepens familiarity with art history and stimulates the discovery of new ways of seeing art.
The game was developed by the artists Tomer Rosenthal, Rotem Linial and the art historian Jesse Lockard along with the many artists friends and students who have played the game in its various iterations, honing its rules, structures and forms. The current prototype was developed by Tomer Rosenthal, Rotem Linial and Jesse Lockard. Thanks to Hila Cohen-Schniderman and Ido Feder for their help and support with the realization of this project.
Tomer Rosenthal Bio
Tomer Rosenthal, born 1987 in Jerusalem, is an artist living and working in Tel-Aviv. He exhibited a solo show at The Jerusalem Artists’ House (2021) and participated in group shows in the US, Europe and Israel. In 2021 he published an artist book. Rosenthal is the recipient of the Osnat Moses Prize for painting (2021), New York Foundation for the Arts’s Artist Fund (2018) and the Keshet award (Bezalel, 2011). Rosenthal is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem BFA (2011) and MFA (2014).
Rotem Linial Bio
Rotem Linial is an artist and educator living and working in New York. She is the founder and director of Cinema Balash, an experimental artist-run micro cinema and screening series. She is a graduate of The School of Visual Theatre (Jerusalem; 2003), Columbia University (New York; BA, BFA, 2008) and Hunter College (New York; MFA, 2014).
Jesse Lockard Bio
Jesse Lockard, PhD, is a historian of visual culture, art, and architecture, whose research interests focus on political theory, aesthetics, and historiography, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary moment. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence - Max-Planck-Institut.
The Third Party
Flora Deborah, Olivia Hild, Haviv Kaptzon, Omer Sheizaf, Yoav Weinfeld
In the frame of the residency “Tights: Dance & Thought Shelter for Calibrating Frequencies” the group worked on a new project integrating text, performance, image and space. Each of the group members created a performance in public space, looking to find magical layers within the city of Tel Aviv. When daylight faded and the night spirits awoke, these performances took place in intimate settings and were captured by invited writers and artists who were especially invited to observe, and then to process what they experienced in writing or image. Those texts and images are collected in a fanzine format, which takes the experiences from the ephemeral event to a manifestation and back into the fleeting realm of the public. The fanzine will be published in the frame of the Diver Festival, accompanied by a personal encounter in a nebulous environment.
The Team Bio
The team is Flora Deborah, Olivia Hild, Haviv Kaptzon, Omer Sheizaf and Yoav Weinfeld, artists working in sculpture, performance, video, installation and drawing. They met while studying Fine Art together at the MFA Bezalel from 2016-2018.
