Bikkurim 5

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Naama Eliraz | Din Bar | Hana Vershkov | Odeya Silber | Michaela Mor | Hodaya Oded | Yael Frenkel

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The fifth edition of the exhibition “Bikkurim” features seven bodies of work by emerging artists who have recently completed their art studies in Jerusalem. Every two years, the New Gallery—Artists’ Studios Teddy publishes an open call for proposals, and the selected artists are accompanied by a guest curator while working on the exhibition.

Sculptures, installations, video works, paintings; ink, ceramics, glass, textiles, and ready-mades—the exhibition “Bikkurim 5” presents multiplicity. This is not a group show that brings together individual artworks under a unifying theme or trend, but one that offers a glimpse into disparate artistic worlds and visions, and into the individual practices of the participating artists. It also presents different attitudes, not only as points of view, but as the ways in which the artists approach the structures that organize the world and the underlying networks of consciousness that inform them.

Odeya Silber’s sculptural installation comprises five hairy simian figures, human-animal hybrids or creations of futuristic fiction. The figures are dressed in camouflage outfits like hunters, but at the same time, they are also prey. Their faces are covered by red butterfly masks and some hold paintings that translate them into color schemes and compositions. They stand, crawl, kneel, and expose their buttocks, in a basic and archetypal repertoire of gestures. “How do we survive this cold, white world together?” asks Silber, proposing a humanity that is animalistic and colorful, captivating and alluring, blending humor, abjectness, and dread.

The human question meets questions about technology in several of the works in the exhibition.

It stands at the heart of Naama Eliraz’s works, one of which is titled “Verify You Are Human”—the (man-made) machine’s demand of humans to identify themselves as such. Here, Eliraz displays several ceramic sculptures (some of which masquerade as marble sculptures) alongside 3D-printed works. The sculptures are immediately situated in the history of art, which serves the artist as a reservoir of the collective unconscious. Ultimately, the questions these works pose are not about technology but about humans, namely: “What makes us human?”

Hana Vershkov’s three works examine the inside-outside hybridization introduced by today’s overstimulating, hyper-consumerist, attention-disrupted digital environments: the news is watched on the toilet, self-care rituals turn out to be a routine of experiments, and scrolling generates shopping, or vice versa. Can we still talk about the body as a singular entity that is separate from technology?

The body—its materiality and absence—is present as both object and subject in Michaela Mor’s works. “In deep grief, the body changes,” writes the artist, “the contours shift and sometimes there is a palpable sense of absence, as if a void has formed inside it that one continues to carry.” The painting is the physical materialization of memory, tracing what has been lost, but also the concreteness of the wounded life it left behind. The work “Heaven?” is a painted folding screen, which recalls both an abstract Matisse and ancient altar paintings. Next to it towers a totem of paintings that add up to form a female figure, or at least her limbs. In both works there is a desire to instill the painting with independence, movement, and agency.

Din Bar disassembles and assembles images in search of Mr. Nobody, “the man behind the wolf,” a dazzling and elusive magician, a faceless silhouette. The basis for the works is video footage from the artist’s childhood, taken with his father at Ben Shemen Youth Village. The video frames are stacked on one another in opaque and perforated layers, where the gaze searches for the trickery that is the creative act.

Hodaya Oded’s works are also playful and surprising. Her ink drawings break down visual images into lines and shapes and then reassemble them with a new material and kinetic logic. The ink is alive and dynamic, and the drawings are reactive and equally based on precision and unpredictability. As the ink spreads, the shape becomes more and more blurry, fluid, and insubstantial, meeting other shapes in an interplay of transparencies and layers, like memory.

For Yael Frenkel, the image is merely the starting point. Her process disintegrates, dissolves, and strips off the image almost to the point of “a thin residue that alludes to a spirit that once existed.” The artistic actions, and subsequent observation, are set in the transitional realms—transitions of time and space. The small dimensions of the works call for an intimate and close observation, one that can engage in deciphering. For Frenkel, the works allow us “to observe something that is closer to an expression of emotion, a feeling that something indefinite and vast exists beyond the seen, simultaneously threatening and cruel, wonderous and wonderful.”

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Curator: Leah Abir

Assistant curator: Tal Marom