Recurrence: Rituals, Place and History

The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation and the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel announce the opening of the exhibition Recurrence: Rituals, Place, and History – A Group Exhibition of Israeli Artists in Cyprus.

The exhibition, which is curated by Drorit Gur Arie, the director and chief curator of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel, presents the work of fourteen leading Israeli artists, who use video as their primary medium of expression. The exhibition features works by artists (in alphabetical order): APT artists, Dana Levy, Yael Bartana, Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, Nira Pereg, Dafna Shalom and Eyal Assulin, Itzik Badash,  Peleg Dishon, Jonathan Doweck, Nevet Yitzhak, Sigalit Landau, Shahar Marcus, , Ran Slavin and Amir Yatziv.

The exhibition brings together for the first time in Cyprus, works by some of the most intriguing personal voices in Israeli video-art today. Their work reveals an affinity with the realms of ritual, Jewish symbolism, and cosmological cyclicality of life and death. The participants represent a generation of young Israeli artists whose members have devised a variety of strategies for approaching the harsh, polarized reality surrounding them. All videos respond to one stratum or more in the multi-layered structure of identity, be it their individual, public, cultural, historic, or political one. Some, like Yael Bartana, Nevet Yitzhak, Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck, appropriate forms, symbols, objects, and sites directly from the physical landscape, often to twist them into subtle political commentary. Others, like Shahar Marcus, employ humour as a tool for deconstructing history’s explosive potential, while yet others, such as Ran Slavin, mix sci-fi aesthetics and archaeological fantasy to portray the peculiar way in which these elements affect everyday politics in Israel. The personal poetry of Dafna Shalom, Dana Levy, Itzik Badash, and Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, exemplifies the work of mourning performed by many Israeli artists, in an attempt to come to terms with the violence of history, the violence of social hardship, or simply interpersonal violence so prevalent in this region.

Drorit Gur Arie the curator, explains the concept of the exhibition Recurrence: “Reconstruction and repetition, a cyclic human state of struggle, construction and destruction, a fusion of reality, speculation, and fiction, anchored in the fascinating relationship between ritual, place and history, are at the core of the exhibition Recurrence, which presents spectacular, stylized, and eye-pleasing manifestation of violence. Eros and Thanatos are thus bound together in a Gordian knot. The exhibition is the first project of Israeli art in Nicosia, Cyprus, staged in collaboration with the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre.”

The exhibition is the result of the collaboration between NiMAC and the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, which began in June 2013 when Drorit Gur Arie presented the contemporary Israeli art scene at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre. A corresponding exhibition with works by Cypriot artists will be held at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in 2015.

The director of NiMAC, Dr. Yiannis Toumazis, commented regarding this collaboration: “What mainly unites our two countries, which are so close and yet so far apart, is the sea. The Mediterranean, regardless of the secular and political systems, serves as a good conductor of human communication, uniting people at a physical and a conceptual level, carrying –from antiquity until today– people, innovative ideas and ideologies both in times of peace and in times of war. It is precisely in this very context that we should view this meeting between Cyprus and Israel. A meeting that began in 2013 when Drorit Gur Arie, the director and chief curator of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, presented at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre courtyard the contemporary art scene of Israel. This marked the beginning of a fruitful cooperation between the two institutions. The exhibition Recurrence: Rituals, Place, and History, which presents the work of fourteen leading Israeli artists, who use the video as their main medium of expression, is the first part of this creative collaboration. Hopefully, a corresponding exhibition of Cypriot artists will be held in Israel, in 2015.”