OPEN EXHIBITIONS
TEL - AVIV
In the spotlightgenius loci
gROUP EXHIBITION
Curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
Rothschild Fine Art GALLERY
48 Yehuda Halevi.
Tel Aviv 6578202, Israel
Telfax. +972 77 5020484
[email protected]
Current genius loci Jan. 28th -
Mar. 10th 2016
It is nearly impossible to ignore the
inextricable tie that binds landscape and
politics. In the local context, this usually
refers to the Israeli-Arab conflict. The
pine forests in the Jerusalem hills, the
glory of the Zionist national institutions’
afforestation projects, are often viewed as
an attempt to Europeanize the East and
as a disruption of the local ecosystem’s
balance. Sabra cactus hedges are forever
read as demarcating ruined Palestinian
villages.
This mode of observation came to the fore
in 1993-94 with Larry Abramson’s “Tsooba”
series of small oil paintings (25x25cm)
of the landscape around Kibbutz Tzuba,
encompassing the ruins of the Arab village
of Tzoba, now part of the hiking route in
the area. He pressed newspaper pages
from Hadashot, a leftist daily (closed down
around that time) onto the surface of the
canvases, then peeled them off. The series
generated a discourse on the inevitable
politicization of the Israeli landscape. The
issue of blind spots in the gaze has
become a litmus test of an artist’s
moral stance. (In the early years of
statehood, painters depicted Arab
villages as documentation and
commemoration. What Abramson
did was to make present the
blindness that became part of the
Israeli gaze and the rapidity with
which ruins were transformed from
a monument to pain into romantic
or transparent structures).W.J.T. Mitchell published his
influential book Landscape
and Power in 1994. The essays
delineated a challenging political
line of thought on reading
landscape. Along with articles on
the New Zealand landscape and
the white settlers’ war against the
Maori, the politics of British garden
landscaping and representations
of African landscapes, Mitchell
also referred to representations of
landscape in Israel-Palestine.In the Introduction to the second
edition (2002), Mitchell wrote that
he would have changed the title
to Space, Place and Landscape:
“Landscape exerts a subtle power
over people, eliciting a broad
range of emotions and meanings
that may be difficult to specify.”
Mitchell explains the differences
and divisions between space
(less defined) and place (which
has ownership), and examines
when “space” or “place” becomes
“landscape.” In this context we may
note the Hebrew word “makom,”
used to refer to both locale and
the Omnipotent.The current exhibition lies in
the field of what Mitchell has
formulated as “a range of emotions
and meanings...” The genius loci
in classical Roman religion refers
to the protective spirit of the