Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters

The Institute of Contemporary Art presents Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters. Organized by prominent Israeli artist and curator Doron Rabina, this exhibition presents work by twenty artists from Israel, Greece, Germany, Belgium, Britain, and America that examines the relationships between originality and origin. Through video, photography, drawing, and sculpture these works take the challenges of "originality"—invention, innovation, novelty—to extremes, while making the term "origin" (genesis, precedent, historical debt, pre-historic territory) a subject.

A sculptural work by Mark Manders shows half-formed humans emerging from and into clay, exploring the myth of the earliest human making. In a similar vein, a video by Gilad Ratman, "The 588 Project," documents a natural mud pool with people, completely immersed, breathing through the tubes, revealing a startlingly contemporary look at life arising out of the mud. Imagery of fossils appears in the work of Tamir Lichtenberg and Yochai Avrahami, and of flame in pieces by Ariel Schlesinger and Carson Fisk-Vittori. "The Earth, the Sun, and the Moon," by Asaf Koriat, looks like a constructed archeological artifact and uses Israeli coins to represent part of the cosmos. Though not exclusively a show of Israeli artists, this show brings the inventive vitality of the Israeli art scene to the American public.