Set in Motion
May 22–September 6, 2014
Petach Tikva Museum of Art
30 Arlozorov St.
Petach Tikva
Israel
Featuring artists:
Tracey Emin, Yasmeen Godder, Dan Graham, Alona Harpaz, Anna K.E., Mike Kelley, MAMAZA (Ioannis Mandafounis, Fabrice Mazliah, May Zarhy), Babette Mangolte, Sergio Prego, Marinella Senatore, Mary Wigman, Nevet Yitzhak, Arkadi Zaides
Curators: Drorit Gur Arie and Avi Feldman
Set in Motion, a first-of-its-kind exhibition in Israel, observes the renewed penetration of dance into the museum space today. It focuses on the choreography’s pulse and the stratification of contemporary dance in relation to the museum’s status and role, to alternative venues, and to collaborations with visual artists, which facilitate the establishment of language and thought, and the formulation of a new dance discourse.
In order to shed light on these themes, the unique exhibition is based on two major axes: community and public sphere. The featured works turn a critical gaze at the body’s power and failures; examine dance as a vehicle for constituting and defining a community; analyze the relationship between spectator, movement, and object; and confront the challenge posed by the moving body to the prevalent frames of museum presentation, collection, and archive.
The exhibition consists of site-specific works created by choreographers working for the very first time in a museum’s space, and works by visual artists for whom dance is a means for personal reflection or communal action. Simultaneously with the exhibition, activities in the public sphere will be held in collaboration with the city’s inhabitants.
The dance piece CLIMAX by Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder will have its world premiere as part of the exhibition. It is Godder’s first experience with site-specific work intended for a museum space, attempting to define a new structure for the intricate dialogue between viewer-object-body-space-time-movement. The work, three hours in-length, will be performed by Godder’s dancers, intermittently, in the museum’s galleries, throughout the duration of the exhibition. The dance piece came into being alongside and combined with objects from her previous works, and juxtaposed with video pieces by several other artists.
Capture Practice, a new video installation, by Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides, explores the impact of the political sphere on the body. The work is based on the “Camera Project” launched by B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories which equips Palestinian volunteers living in the Occupied Territories with video cameras documenting their lives and human rights violations. The original use of archival materials to create a semiotic history of movements, as arising from the gestures of the documenters and documented in Capture Practice, brings questions concerning the ways in which choreographers use visual documentary and the transformation of the human body itself into a living archive.
The work of MAMAZA explores the affinities between culture and the public sphere in an attempt to define a community. In their work ASINGELINE, an enacted thought made visible, a red line, intended to link and connect, is stretched from the world of the dance stage or cultural center to the public sphere. The choreographers leave the stage for the street, enter houses and meet with the locals, together identifying points of contact and connection. Thus far, MAMAZA have marked over eight kilometers of red line in various cities in Europe and Africa. This is their first activity in Israel, where they will stretch a red line between the Petach Tikva Museum of Art and the urban sphere around it.
About the Museum
Petach Tikva Museum of Art is a contemporary art space, featuring works by Israeli and international artists in diverse media. The Museum address a wide spectrum of themes from the Israeli cultural sphere, alongside universal issues pertaining to global society in the contemporary era, while promoting innovative approaches to the museum space and the breaching of traditional conventions and boundaries between different artistic mediums and their modes of presentation.
