Artist Wall: Belle Shafir

Saturday, 18.02.17, 20:00

Sunday, 15.10.17

:

Svetlana Reingold

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04-60-30-800
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Born in Germany, 1953 / Lives and works in Israel.

Belle Shafir's installation is a delicate wall piece involving a video projected onto and through plaited horsehairs. The video shows the wide-open eye of the artist, gazing back at the viewer through the horsehairs. Shafir's use of this material is charged with meaning: her parents, Holocaust survivors from Poland, immigrated to Germany after the war and founded a horse ranch. Life on the ranch among the horses, and the routine care for them, were a central part of Shafir's teenage years. Later, as a young woman, the artist rebelled against her parents and their way of life, emigrated from Germany to Israel, developed an artistic career, and cut off relations with her past. The choice of horsetail hair, forty years later and after the death of her parents, is a kind of reconciliation and a renewal of contact with the childhood origins she had rejected.

The eye, enlarged to gigantic proportions, remains open, exposed, and defenseless, yet offering a direct gaze that can penetrate forbidden, concealed spaces. This power is also implied in the installation's title, Suchbewegung, freely translated as "Search for Movement." The gaze, a central tool in the artist's work, is turned to her personal past in order to tell the world a new story – one that stirs the viewer to contemplate his own world of memories, as well as the present surroundings.

 

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