Artists in Residency Exhibit: No Space Between Us

Artists in Residency Exhibit: No Space Between Us

The Givat Haviva Shared Art Center has been operating for over 40 years, creating and running shared art programs for Arabs and Jews. The Center is a thought leader in shared society in the field of art and provides space and a stage for art that reflects the multifaceted and complex society in which Israelis live.

 

The Center aims to influence the world of Israeli art and culture, while scrutinizing various Israeli narratives, studying and making art accessible to all communities in Israel, and curating high quality exhibitions that give a platform to Jewish and Arab artists who cast light on the relations between the two societies.

 

Givat Haviva’s Artists in Residency program is unique in the field of Israeli art. Living and working together the young artists are influenced by each other, and get to know, often for the first time in their lives, the culture and way of life of people from the other society.

 

Anat Lidror, Director of the Shared Art Center and Curator of the Givat Haviva Art Gallery; Harel Luz, curator the Artists in Residency exhibit, and Orit Reingewertz, residency program coordinator, shared with Friends of Givat Haviva details about the artists in this year’s residency program and the artworks they created.

 

For this year’s cohort of artists in Givat Haviva’s residency program, nine young artists, Jews and Arabs, were selected to participate for a period of five months that included three months of communal living and creating. The exhibition “No Space Between Us” presents the works they created throughout this period in painting, sculpture, photography, video, and sound.

 

The name of the exhibition is the starting point for a personal and collective journey in a shared space, one that is both physical and emotional. The works examine two contrasting types of gazes: one consists of works that look inwards, at the close and intimate, the familial, and the other looks outwards, toward nature and the human sphere.

 

The exhibition is a collection of gazes that meet and linger together, intersect, and influence each other.  View the No Space Between Us Catalog.

 

View the No Space Between Us Catalogue

 

Chen Chefetz paints a family meal in France, on a tablecloth. Portraits of family members dining together around a family dinner table, looking and smiling at each other, he expresses his sense of longing for a family he never knew, a yearning for belonging alongside a feeling of being absent. In the video “Crumbs” he cleans up the crumbs left over from the meal, and in the background his grandmother’s voice tells the story of her immigration voyage from Morocco through France to Israel.

 

Fayza Badarneh returns to objects that belong to her mother, and her special connection through them to her mother: a wallet, a rolling pin, a mortar and pestle with their aroma of garlic. Fayza carves on rolling pins words that her mother would say to her while preparing the dough, such as “press”, “crooked”, “quickly”. 

 

Amit Gavish paints old childhood photographs on envelopes, documents of her own childhood and that of her twin sister. The fragmented paintings on the envelopes reveal a moment of togetherness that is also a moment of parting and separateness. 

 

The heaven-earth axis is evident in the work of Yarin Abu Hamad, who takes us to the star map and draws us back as a melody through an analog music box, bearing testimony to a jarring event that occurred. 

 

Alumah Fishman photographs zones of conflict through the window of a travelling car and joins the photographs to form nocturnal panoramic collages. This cinematic gaze frames the landscape as a theater set with no actors.

 

Noga Davis directs her gaze both at Givat Haviva and the close familiar local landscape and at the view of Yehia, an Arab boy studying at Givat Haviva, whom she met during her time there, resulting in a dialogue. 

 

In her video work, Lila Abd Elrazaq examines terms from the field of biology, such as “parasitism”, “devouring”, and “competition”, through the behavior of animals in nature – metaphorically examining their reflection in human society.

 

Tala creates small sculptures resembling embryonic figurines, dipped in sugar water, and invites both insects and viewers to approach these quasi-human creatures.

 

Sarah Khatib creates a large painting of a space that resembles a set, where birds and human figures switch roles. Their gazes intersect and create endless movement within the painting.

 

“No Space Between Us” is a call for closeness among humans and between people and art, particularly in the present times when reality is trying to keep us apart. Through the works that seemingly seek to interconnect, a new space of movement is formed, where the gaze roams freely, unfettered.