Painting – Installation – Video
15.12.18 – 1.2.19
Rafi Münz – Yael Lev
_______________________________
Curator: Anat Lidror
Eretz is a combined exhibition by the artists
Rafi Münz and Yael Lev.
It is a song of love and concern for our
country, a collection of sounds and melodies
begging to be heard together in a spirit of
playfulness and humor: means, perhaps, to sense
the blend of feelings everyone has for this
country where we were born or where we live.
Mixed feelings, of love / hate,
remoteness/intimacy, resistance/acceptance,
friendship and concern, a deliberate look at our
country, which as such is able to express,
comment and do; a look that contains protest but
is not helpless and is free of victimhood.
This exhibition waspoured from the outdoors and
born into the space of the Peace Gallery. "We
covered serious mileage on land, air, and sea
while "shooting pictures" at different times of
the day, on various sites and on various
subjects (Rafi).
This is the internal and external journey taken
by Rafi and Yael in 2018, a year that marked the
70th anniversary of the State of Israel. In two
personal voices dancing together, they raise a
big question for this country we all live in:
What was it? What happened to it? What is it
today?
And, how does all this live within us?
The journey speaks, as well, the voices of
entire groups of people living in it: young
people, some of who are leaving for
Europe (Jews and Arabs alike); senior
citizens who often sound the voice of no longer
recognizing their own country; agriculturists
and residents of rural areas, kibbutzim &
moshavim; Jewish
and Arab, that once produced and worked the land
and today are practically erased or are being
driven from the possibility of working the land; groups
with an ecological outlook and an ever-expanding
understanding that today ecology is not a luxury
but a necessity; groups
that believe in shared life and still
remember the cooperation that existed in the
distant past.
Finally, the secular public or pluralistic
public that find it difficult to see here
today the narrative of the country which it
knew, or find its own place in light of the
growing processes of religionization and
radicalization.
Components of the exhibit work on a wide range
of senses thus expand the visual glimpse of
shared experiences: simple and complex painting,
realistic and expressive, graphic and
sculptured, abstract and verbal, text -
painting, relief and installation (Rafi), moving pictures
of concrete images or abstract reality by the
movement of the camera / movement of traveling,
voices, sounds and improvised music projected
from two projectors (Yael).
"The collection
of sensations that I am feeling today, when I
say “Eretz”, emphasizes simultaneously the
resistance and the impossible and irrevocable
connection between my country and me." (Yael) Yael
weaves together and moves freely
from artistic conventions on the continuum
between documentary and art. She
avoids the definitions such as video art
and relates almost equally to image and sound,
as well as the concrete and abstract. She works
through thetrembling and
the personal as well as the thorough and
investigative.
Rafi, a veteran
conceptual artist who
creates a conceptual graphic dialogue using the
language of graffiti art, specializes in
combining precise techniques with sloppy
techniques and "correct" techniques with
techniques that do not conform to "acceptable
rules for painting." Rafi challenges the space
outside, available and visible to all (walls of
buildings, fences and barriers,
boards, and
other parts of the road are a platform) with
subversive content, like a "court
jester," and
thus makes it possible, perhaps, to
be "digestible."
Do humorous art and silliness have a place of
honor in the art field today? Just
as the brush and the colors are the tools of Rafi Münz's
work, so is the spirit of nonsense and humor. These
allow multiple meanings and cathartic
liberation. It might be exactly what is required
today for the sake of being able to live and to
deal with the conflictual content of
our country.
Rafi speaks;Yael
works through underground
feelings, non-verbally. This honorable,
inspiring artistic friendship exists in
cooperative actions over the year between the
two.
In Arabic,“Eretz”(country) was translated into Biladi (my
country, a multi-layered expression). Rafi
and Yael cannot bring a personal outlook, in
first person, of the Arabs living
here, who will certainly not call their land the
Land of Israel (a pair of words, some of which
equate to the expression Greater Israel). However,
they
can see and revive this country as a country
with a joint conception, to create the space in
this exhibition to express it and choose to call
the exhibition in Arabic- Biladi, and not just Bilad.
“Eretz” is
the landscape of our childhood, the country we
love so much and refuse to leave, but the life
in it, its processes of growth and change, hold
in us feelings that move back and forth
between those memories and tender feelings to
the contemporary feelings and sensations. Those
eventually are forced to live together inside
us.
Anat Lidror, curator
____________________________________________________________________________
Times: Sun.-Thu. 9 a.m.-4 p.m. | Fri.
10 a.m.-1 p.m. | Sat. by appointment.
Tel: 04-6372824 | artgvha@givathaviva.org.il
Rafi Műnz
|
Art & Nonsense
|
refael.il@gmail.com
|
0546-829331 | 
