Barricades

Artists: Absalon, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Saher Miari, Shahar Yahalom.
Curator: Karmit Galili

Magasin III Jaffa is pleased to announce the group exhibition Barricades, which explores the affinities between resistance and construction through various works of art. While barricades, broken windows, fire, and destruction are the immediate visual conjured up by the term “resistance,” resistance is not always antithetical to power structures. Even when it acts against them, it is part of them, sharing methods, materials, and forms with them, existing on their margins, or reproducing them within itself. Resistance to power requires continuous acts of construction and renewal. The Israeli present is a good case in point.

The starting point for the exhibition is two video works by Absalon, who worked in Paris in the early ’90s of the last century, Proposals for Habitation (1991) and Solutions (1992). In both video works Absalon built a domestic space that provides the body with protection, while at the same time restricting and suppressing it. Narrow and claustrophobic, it does not allow room for movement, bearing resemblance to the structures where the power operates, but it is also the place from which Absalon constitutes himself as a resisting individual and as an artist.

Affinities between resistance and construction also appear in the works of Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Saher Miari and Shahar Yahalom, who work in present day Israel, and engage with resistance as a process that must first be built internally. In their works, plaster, cardboard, iron, and concrete become a double signifier of both oppression and resistance to it, while probing the thin, deceptive line between the two.

In the series End of Hebron Road, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz recounts the story of the thousands of Palestinian laborers who cross from the West Bank into Israel every morning through Checkpoint 300 (Rachel Crossing) through the story of one worker. Ickowicz does not photograph the workers, the checkpoint, or the soldiers, but focuses on a makeshift structure, which is built by one of the workers as a shelter during long waiting hours. For some four years, sometimes day after day, he shot the temporary structure that is dismantled time and time again by the Israeli authorities. By choosing to avoid photographing the soldiers and the workers, the turnstiles, fences, and the rest of the checkpoint's hustle and bustle, he turns his gaze away from the permanent structures of the checkpoint routine to their reflections in the changing images of the temporary structure leaning against an olive tree.

In Saher Miari's biography, construction preceded art. Miari was a construction worker before and during his art studies, and to this day he defines himself as an artist-builder. This was also the time when his identity as a Palestinian Arab resident of Israel was formed. The techniques, tools, and materials he previously used in his construction work now serve him in his art. Unhomely is a room-shaped structure made of layers of welded iron mesh used to reinforce concrete. Miari lays it bare, concrete cubes hanging inside. While the welded iron mesh reveals the innards of the act of construction, usually concealed within the reinforcement and fortification of the Israeli house, the concrete cubes are reminiscent of the other houses, those emptied of their inhabitants, erased and forgotten.

Shahar Yahalom's tomb sculptures are plaster molds that she creates over existing sculptures she collects, iconic images of animals, plants, and inanimate objects. After casting the plaster, Yahalom cuts the mold open. She removes the original sculpture, returns it to its owner, and reconnects the mold. The sculpture she ultimately exhibits is thus the empty grave of another sculpture. At times, the tomb is presented as is; at others, it functions as a model for the creation of a custom-made ceramic armor. In the current exhibition, Yahalom presents a ceramic armor of a garden doe sculpture from a plant nursery in Kafr Yasif, a pair of plaster gloves—a grave for her own hands, and a tomb of a plastic fir tree made in China, with a parrot perched on it. By burying the tree in a firm structure, Yahalom concurrently protects and restricts it, indicating its being an inanimate object, unable to grow. The very act introducing the limitations of the image also changes the power relations between animal, plant, and object. The sculptures are juxtaposed with handmade prints showing various states of living, death, burial, and embalming. Each print is a structure made of elements from the fauna, flora, and inanimate worlds, thus eliminating the accepted distinction between life and death, surrendering to existing hierarchies, undermining them, and setting out to reconstruct them.

About Magasin III Jaffa
Magasin III Jaffa is an exhibition space, a permanent satellite established by Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art from Stockholm, Sweden. Magasin III Jaffa’s diverse program features both local and international contemporary artists. Since opening at 2018, Magasin III Jaffa has presented solo exhibitions by Haim Steinbach, Shiela Hicks, Cosima von Bonin, Tal R, Maya Attoun, Polly Apfelbaum and David Adika. The space is located on 34 Olei Zion, in a residential neighborhood rich with history and cultural diversity, that borders with Jaffa’s famous flea market. Magasin III Jaffa’s unique architecture enables passersby to view the exhibitions from the outside, day and night.

For press inquiries, please contact: Magasin III Jaffa, Jaffa@magasin3.com