The exhibition Tzimtzum is a product of artist Jan Tichy’s three-month residency in Jerusalem at the New Gallery at Teddy Stadium. Tichy emigrated to Jerusalem from Czechia in the ‘90s, and today he is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

The works in the exhibition were created specifically for the gallery space. During his residency, Tichy turned the gallery into a laboratory for examining the social and cultural space it occupies - the intersection of the Malha, Katamonim and Sharfat neighborhoods. In each of the neighborhoods, Tichy created works using contact documentary. He copied designed elements that separate private and public spaces and natural elements from the local flora onto found paper that was made photo-sensitive (cyanotype). In Malha, he made cyanotypes with pages of an old edition of Encyclopedia Hebraica on the fences and gates of historic homes that once belonged to the Arab village of al-Maliha that was there pre-1948. In Sharfat, he made cyanotypes on papers from the Arab education system, attaching them to plants growing in the neighborhood while still rooted in the ground. In Katamonim, he used charcoal rubbing to capture the wall textures of public housing building slated for demolition through the “Pinui-Binui” process.

While in Israel, Tichy photographed the places he used to live and work using two analog cameras that he received that belonged to Jewish American photographers Robert Frank and Nathan Lerner. The use of these cameras, imbued with both personal history and the history of photography, itself became a tool for documenting, exploring and observing the landscape and its natural and manmade components.

The installation, which connects the gallery, the Teddy Stadium and the surrounding neighborhoods, is composed of light projections onto a pile of printing papers, which were collected from the cultural institution offices of the Jerusalem Municipality and will return to use after the exhibition is over. Displayed on the second floor is a collection of photographic etchings from 40 projection installations from around the world that Tichy has created over the last twenty years. They express the concept of ‘social formalism’, a term coined by Tichy to describe socially conscious art using visually formalistic language that exists at intersections where forms collide with their circumstances. In his work, Tichy responds to the way in which structure, form, infrastructure, and the organization of space or territory are crystallized by social, economic or national agents of power.

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Curator: Ilanit Konopny

Director & Chief Curator: Tamar Gispan-Greenberg

Producer: Noa Weiss Simon

Thanks:

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design - The Department of Photography; HaCubia - Art School and Contemporary Art Gallery;

The Djanogly Visual Arts Center; Beita - Home for Art and Society in the City

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The exhibition was produced with the support of the Israel Lottery Council For Culture & Arts