Today’s art from Tel Aviv:

Ayelet Ben Dor
Yael Efrati
Elad Larom
Haran Mendel

“Reunion with someone’s friends”

Eröffnung: 10.07.2013, 20 Uhr
Ausstellung: 10.07 bis 28.07.2013
Öffnungszeiten: 12.7. – 28.7., Fr-So, 16h-18h

“Reunion with someone’s friends” is a group exhibition by four Israeli artists.
Haran Mendel was a resident in the Frise institute last year, and now he is back with friends.
Ayelet Ben Dor, Yael Efrati, Elad Larom and Haran Mendel studied together in an MFA program in Tel Aviv. Since then they have exhibited together in several independent group exhibitions in Israel.
They were invited to the Frise for a one month residency and the exhibition is partly comprised of works that were created during this stay.

Ayelet Ben Dor usually creates video-animation.
Her films are made of frame-by-frame drawings and animated objects, all made in classic methods.
For the “Reunion with someone’s friends” exhibition, Ayelet created works inspired by the Elbe River. Being a visitor in a strange city makes one return to her basic instincts, as in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick:
“Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

Yael Efrati’s works combine photography and sculpture. She responds to her local urban surroundings, Tel Aviv in particular. In attempt to bring part of her city to Hamburg Efrati sent sliced fragments of an ordinary apartment window through the Israeli post office services. She also sent half a photograph, taken in her parents garden.It’s other half was completed during her stay in the city.

Elad Larom: “This body of work is dealing around the notions of tribes, the hidden and the manifested.
Coming from a conflict zone made me think about the division and separation of communities into groups. Along side with the elusive nature of defining tribes comes to mind the hidden nature of the visual appearance.
This mind game of religion, myth and sexuality fascinates me and projects in all levels of meaning in this series.
My work consist a combination of visual raw materials. I like to take images from different worlds all around and confront them on one platform. When it succeeds it’s creating a sort of poetics of aesthetics and content.
Because the painting medium today is so extensively used I find that I can not escape me from making art that thinks about itself.”

Haran Mendel: “Questions of my artistic survival and my vision of this field are taking me back and forth all the time. I left the studio and after a short break I started working at home. Things have changed, the size, material. But mostly it’s what I’m trying to is remove the pressure off, want to go back to the base of the work. In the last few months I mostly paint and my feelings and my fears translate to the page.”

Project coordination: Michael Kress
Kindly supported by the Kulturbehörde Hamburg and the Rudolf Augstein foundation.
Special thanks to Julia Dautel and Stephanie Reuter