Draw Eight Arrows
Under Your Feet

The exhibition is presented at the Yama Gallery, Hagaton 3, Nahariya

In which direction will the compass point you?

Eight female artists arrive in Nahariya Central Station, some for the first time in their lives, as part of a collaboration between the Edmond de Rothschild Center and Yama Gallery. They come with questions. Each of them is seeking to discover something new in her own and her work’s encounter with the city’s physical and human space. The artist’s action in a foreign city mixes humility and courage leading to intense feelings that fluctuate between touristic curiosity, feverish exploration, the freedom of anonymity and the loneliness of not belonging.

A public artist explores the labyrinth of the city and its tangled web of relationships, tracing signs-not-signs. In her wanderings, the artist sometimes seems lost or idle, but in fact she is a collector—a gatherer of the marginal in the mundane, endowing it with refinement and validity. She is the defender of anti-efficiency, anti-consumerist culture, battling blind obedience to the system.

Public artists have partners in the extraordinary use of the urban space: parkour, skate and graffiti gangs, lonely wanderers, pigeon feeders and cat carers, kids of all ages engaged in varied outdoor activities, seniors deeply immersed in conversation or passionate play. Collectively, they constitute a forceful presence of beauty and compassion, while independently, they create private moments in the midst of the public. Moments that seemingly whisper in the public’s ear: “The truth is hidden, the balance of power is fragile and changing, it is possible to move completely differently.” This faint whisper rumbles, opening a crack in the walls of hard reality. Dull everyday sights such as a green garbage receptacle or gray fence, suddenly reveal themselves as exciting, the stranger-other becomes familiar and takes on a name and meaning, the natural laws of the city are broken.

The eight female artists create fissures, islands of aesthetic freedom, and just as the city lives and breathes, so the exhibition within it lives, grows and withers with time.

The title of the exhibition is an instruction, something that anyone can do.  It is taken from the book Other Exercises, the second of a series of five performative art exercise booklets (the first of which is titled Exercises, the third is titled Other Other Exercises, and so on) by Kurt Johannessen. Here is the original exercise: “Draw hundreds of tiny arrows pointing in all directions under your feet. Go to a beach where there is no wind. Look out on the ocean.”  Johannessen’s exercise book was inspired by Fluxus, artists in the 1960s and 70s who would invite people to participate and create their own artistic experiences in the “do-it-yourself” mode.

In the exhibition you can wander around, observe, get to know, say goodbye, rest, fold a paper boat, relinquish guilt, hear a story, lend a hand, pay attention to time, not pay attention to time, recognize, ask, lose and find.

Postscript. Keys to deepening the encounter with the exhibition’s works can be found in the studio—in the Documentation Processes, containing conceptual and physical raw materials from the creative processes collected and edited by the artists for a “behind the scenes” exhibition.