NYAB Event - “Blank Verse” Exhibition

“Blank Verse” Exhibition

Andrea Meislin Gallery

This event has ended.

Blank Verse inquires into the space that lies between the poetic and the documentary, and considers the ways in which one can activate the other. Triggered by the notion that ‘the personal is political,’ the exhibition threads together a variety of practices that deal simultaneously with politics, poetics, documentation and the ways in which images get disseminated. Through the works of six Israeli artists, Blank Verse raises questions about power relations in a turbulent cultural climate and looks into the ways in which the poetic can function as documentation; the extent to which it can carry a political charge—and if it is in, or out, of place.

Taking the complexity of the Middle East as a ‘case study’ for examining these notions, the show is conceived as a spectrum through which the viewer can observe different positionalities regarding the relationship between the poetic and the documentary. Surveying dialectic oppositions within this shifting spectrum, the exhibition extends from strategies of documentary photography to physical interventions, fictional narratives and appropriation.

Known for his search of the poetics of everyday life, Sharon Ya’ari’s (b.1966) oeuvre renders the quotidian as a meditation on a contrived existential condition. Through his use of straightforward documentation Ya’ari shifts the focus from the ghastly to the subtle, from the explicit to the transcendent. In his Threshold series artist Nir Evron (b.1974) uses a traditional 35mm camera to document the empty spaces of the West Bank’s Rawabi Neighborhood—the first planned Palestinian community. These eerie documentations of muted spaces are a silent contemplation on a densely packed political package. In imposing double exposures on empty spaces, notably thresholds, Evorn’s photographs abstract an absurd situation and serve as testimony to the diffusion of utopian dreams.

Tel Aviv-based artist Hinda Weiss (b.1980) re-composes documentary footage into a surreal essay of observance, taking as inspiration and emulation in formation Colonial depictions of the Middle East. Her video collage Postcard from Tel Aviv, is a poetic impasse that teases out the connection between 19th century colonialism and the colonial appetite of contemporary economic forces.

Documentation of Colonialism is further explored through Michal Bar-Or’s (b.1984) appropriation of imagery found in the archives of the Palestinian exploration Fund in London- known to be the first Colonial archive. In The Ruler, Bar-Or plays on questions of scale, point of view and architectonic space to raise questions on inherited histories, lost narratives and the ways of disseminating prescribed knowledge.

In her interventions on documented landscapes, New York artist Dana Levy presents a video installation that incorporates footage of her 2015 excursions to the Dead Sea with found materials. Bringing a breath of life to a space considered as utterly dead, Levy’s Monoliths invokes a sense of fiction. While fellow New York artist Keren Benbenisty (b.1977) uses documentation of fiction as if it was objective fact. Her hand-painted flags and invented maps defy our constant need for context. Mimicking nationalistic symbols, yet avoiding any attempt of categorization, Benbenisty’s work is a collection of consonances that refuse to amount to a musical score.

In our time of visual super-habit it seems like only crude, direct images can perform and generate political action. However, within an increasingly tense cultural reality, in which every action has to be meditated, the poetic might present a vehicle to transmit a message where straight documentation will be silenced.