Naomi Lev

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  interviews January 16, 2018

  Dana Yoeli

  Dana Yoeli is an Israeli artist based in Tel Aviv. Her current solo show at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art showcases her project Olympia, 2017, which extends her explorations into architecture, Israeli mythologies, nostalgia, nationalism, and catastrophic events. The exhibition is on view through February 3, 2018.

  THE HERZLIYA MUSEUM, founded in 1965 as Beit Yad Labanim, was originally constructed and maintained by a volunteer organization to preserve the memory of fallen soldiers and provide care for their deprived families. In 2000, architects Yaakov and Amnon Rechter designed a bypass

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  picks October 13, 2017

  Elia Alba

  The sixty individual portraits of nonwhite artists taken by Elia Alba for her current exhibition here, titled “The Supper Club,” are mostly of people she came to know through a series of dinner parties she organizes. Topics surrounding race, the art world, and visual culture are frequently discussed at these events, and the project became an expansive, multidimensional discourse on selfhood and politics.

  Alba tailors each portrait to the artist. She chooses an assortment of backdrops, props, and costumes to accentuate her sitters’ personae while subtly highlighting their contributions to the

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  picks July 07, 2017

  Hadassa Goldvicht

  In 2013, artist Hadassa Goldvicht was invited to participate as an artist-in-residence at Beit Venezia, a Jewish cultural foundation in Venice established to celebrate five hundred years of the diaspora’s existence in the city. Since then, the artist, who resides in Jerusalem, has been returning to Venice for interviews, meals, and prayers with the local community. During this time, she met Aldo Izzo, an eighty-six-year-old former sea captain who, for more than three decades, has been the caretaker for Venice’s two Jewish cemeteries (he is also the person many in the community turn to for their

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  picks July 05, 2017

  Etti Abergel

  For nearly four decades, Etti Abergel has been investigating and expressing a lineage of exile: Her parents, who were born in Morocco and fled to Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s, have struggled with their new location and identity. A sense of estrangement has been passed down to Abergel, despite her being born and raised in the Jewish state. Her current exhibition is a parting ceremony from her migrant identity.

  A wooden bridge leads viewers through the length of the gallery. Without a real aim or purpose, the bridge, decorated with metal-can mobiles and plastic tote bags—materials the artist

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  picks March 17, 2017

  “Evidentiary Realism”

  “Evidentiary Realism,” the title of this exhibition, is a term coined by its curator, Paolo Cirio. It refers to art that, in his words, “portrays and reveals evidence from complex social systems.” The works in this fourteen-person show heighten our awareness of the foul social and political infrastructures that seem to be dominating much of the world today.

  Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s series “Expanding and Remaining,” 2016, uses ISIS’s English print magazine as a source for colorful, systematic abstract paintings, rendering the basic graphic structure of the periodical’s layout sans text. Nearby is

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  diary October 01, 2016

  Candy Shop

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, everyone arrived utterly exhausted—yet somehow still intact. “In Vienna we live as people aspire to: We drink mineral water from tap, we swim in drinking-water-quality lakes, and we don’t have to talk about organic, because all of our products are raised in farms around Vienna. Plus, it is available to everyone, not only to the top 1 percent,” said the fair’s artistic director, Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, “However, people see Vienna as old and opera, and are not truly aware of the quality of contemporary culture here.”

  VC is a serious vehicle for rebranding Vienna as a

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  picks September 19, 2016

  “The Kids Want Communism”

  This yearlong three-part show offers an alternative for future generations—its thesis bluntly states that communism is alive and kicking and that it is the solution for contemporary universal matters. Focusing on past events as well as present philosophical discourses, the exhibition’s ideas are supported by sci-fi scenes and outer-space images that trace the technological shift of the twentieth century and the era of Soviet-style “real socialism.” For example, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2016, a bookcase designed by Nicole Wermers, displays an edition of the compilation. In the spirit of

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  picks April 29, 2016

  Dor Guez

  Created by Dor Guez in 2009, “The Christian Palestinian Archive” invites the titular community to scan their family photographs, in an attempt to trace their histories and journeys. As part of this project, fourteen black-and-white photos tell the family story of Samira Monayer, the artist’s grandmother. These images, from a series titled “Scanogram #1,” 2010, were scanned multiple times and reassembled using a variety of digital programs to accentuate the original photos’ rips and tears. Guez, the inventor of the scanogram technique, seeks to emphasize the creases of time and convey the natural

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  picks April 19, 2016

  Roee Rosen

  Roee Rosen has adopted alter egos and created fictional biographies throughout his thirty-year career. His retrospective “Group Exhibition” presents drawings, paintings, text, and film authored by his different personas. The works are filled with sexual and violent scenes à la Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), but their scandalousness is diffused by Rosen’s intellectual humor. However, to fully enjoy these often small-scale drawings, one must carefully read the accompanying texts that take the form of novellas or fictional biographies.

  Rosen’s characters are crafted

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  interviews November 05, 2015

  Lior Shvil

  “PROTOCOLS,” Lior Shvil’s exhibition in New York, features a large-scale installation inspired by military counterinsurgency training courses as well as two performances. As part of by Performa 15, events will be held on November 14 and November 21, 2015, which are the product of ongoing workshops in which Shvil invites nonprofessional performers to play an active role in improvisational combat procedures. “PROTOCOLS” opened on September 12 and is on view at Art in General in New York through November 21, 2015.

  I FIRST LEARNED OF TWENTYNINE PALMS, a city in Southern California that houses a vast

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  picks September 14, 2015

  Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela

  In 2009, Israeli artists Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela initiated their collaborative “Exterritory Project,” which projected works by Middle Eastern artists onto the sails of boats located in exterritorial waters just outside of Israel. The duo’s most recent body of work in this show, curated by Chen Tamir, consists of three videos that similarly investigate the role of censorship, ethics, and the gravity of images in contemporary regimes.

  The two-channel video Image Blockade, 2015, for example, explores the physiological effect of Israeli intelligence veterans’ training on their sensory perception.

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  picks May 18, 2015

  Roi Kuper

  In April 2014, Israeli artist Roi Kuper began working on a series of panoramic photographs intending to capture the city of Gaza from the direction of the four winds. Shot from six different locations, including Kibbutzes surrounding the Gaza Strip, one of which the artist was born on, the resulting series “Gaza Dream,” 2014, manifests Kuper’s signature style, with each panorama as a bisected horizontal landscape. In the lower half of the photographs are fields, dunes, or hills, and in the upper half there’s a clear blue sky, making for a serene view. The images’ foregrounds are Israeli