Etti Abergel, one of the artists working in the New Gallery Artists’ Studios, celebrates her deep bonds with the city of Jerusalem in this exhibition. After leaving the city where she lived for more than 30 years, she stops to observe her work process and the art language she has been formulating since the 1980s when she arrived in Jerusalem as a 20-year-old to begin her studies at Bezalel. The stop signifies a turning point.

     The current exhibit moves between three major chapters: the first is a space devoted to the artist’s drawings. The space offers a galactic atmospheric experience in which to encounter the architectural plans of the rented apartments in which she lived as a metaphorical space of memory.

     The second chapter is installed in the gallery’s central exhibition space. A structure made of poles, bound and distinct, was constructed and installed, inspired by synagogue prayer stands or temporary huts on stilts. A dense cluster of past works, fragments, and new works have been placed on top of the structure, crowded together into a sort of conglomerate. Perhaps this is the contents of the artist’s suitcase, passing from place to place with her over the years, accumulating life experiences and impressions, changing in accordance with needs and location.

     In the adjacent video room clips documenting art construction and deconstruction actions of installations in selected exhibition spaces where Abergel installed works in Israel and abroad are screened, edited like an archive of moments accumulating into a creative personal history moving and wandering between cities and continents, between reality and imagination.

     The third chapter, installed on the upper gallery floor, invites viewers to move around and between plaster weights which simulate an explosion of the sculpture of a body. Collected fragments of artworks move around themselves, hovering over the exhibition. Metal cables stretch between the walls of the gallery spaces in a seeming attempt to anchor the various sections of the exhibition and reinforce them, link them, and fix them in place, yet simultaneously propose the possibility that they are suspended over an abyss. This additional step, over and inside of the spaces, associates the exhibition with Abergel’s act of drawing from which the installations emerged, all moving between the earthbound and the metaphysical.

     The exhibition title, Arouse Love, is taken from the Song of Songs, signifying the presence of Jerusalem in the artist’s subconscious as a mystical image and place, in the spirit of the Moroccan piyyutim [liturgical poems] that she learned in childhood from her grandfather, Jerusalem as a utopian longing and yearning for a place beyond reality. The poetic atemporal traditional verse stands in contrast to the deconstruction, dismantling, and farewell from a foundational chapter in Abergel’s oeuvre made in Jerusalem.

Director and Curator: Tamar Gispan – Greenberg