In Context

The group exhibition In Context examines the relationship between viewer, artist, and artwork within the community context, making the exhibition’s surroundings – the port of Caesarea – a point of reference in the works. The exhibition presents nine works of sculpture, installation and video by young experienced artists who participated in the Edmond de Rothschild Center’s professional training program for artists and designers.

A clear trend in recent years extolls the experiential turn of viewing contemporary art. Traditionally, with the emergence of modernism, an object in the museum space was viewed through a critical paradigm. The viewer was charged with deciphering the work’s meaning and the artist’s intentions. Today, some of the newer trends emphasize the participatory or viewing experience within the communal context, which is material, physical, and sensory. This paradigm offers the opportunity to step beyond the limitations of the socio-political analysis of a work of art and to have a physical and personal experience. Instead of being displayed as remote artifacts, artworks become an opening for an intimate encounter that enable viewers to share in the artists’ lives, environment and community. This material-sensory-bodily turn expands the principles of visual art and includes also, for example, new technologies and designs, enabling artists to traverse cultural, linguistic and geographical barriers.

The exhibition In Context is an attempt to actively express these changes from inside the art field. The emphasis in the exhibition is on the artist’s or the designer’s cultural-communal contexts and invites the viewer to meet these layers and to turn the art into a platform for dialog. Although the turn emphasizes the visual-physical, the exhibition does not promise an immersive art experience that engages all of the senses. The works in the exhibition do touch on the pop style and they are sensory, but more importantly, each artist reveals to us their own personal situation, where they were physically during the creative act, thus drawing us into their personal and concrete world.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, In Context, also refers to the exhibition space in the Caesarea port overlooking the sea. Like a coastline, some of the works express liminal spaces, as for example Lital Goldenberg’s delicate work In Between, which deals with the relationship between exterior and interior, or Asa Rikin’s work that uses the image of the sea and digital means to explore the tension between the real and the abstract. Other works in the exhibition express a sort of “collision” between sea and land and grapple with ecological aspects, such as Gal Brin’s embroidery series depicting ancient artifacts and waste recovered from Caesarea’s beaches, Evgenia Kirshtein’s pottery work that deals with the collapse of bee colonies and the technological-evolutionary processes accelerated by this phenomenon, or Benjamin Haasnoot’s boat sculpture that uses new technologies to reconstruct long-ago family knowledge.