May 4 to August 17, 2018
537 West 24th Street and 510 West 25th Street, both between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, pacegallery.com

At first glance, the tiny wriggling strokes repeated in line formation in each of Michal Rovner’s large video-based tableaux appear to be legs, or the balletically pointed toes, perhaps, of variously jerking and swaying dancers. (Rovner’s technique entails an ingenious capture of what look to be vignettes of individual video deployed in an extended grid.) But these gyrating limbs could also be chromosomes bouncing back and forth. Or maybe some kind of inkblot test, eluding identification. Whatever these simplified human shapes are, they’re stripped of uniqueness.

“Evolution” is shown at both the 24th and 25th Street locations of Pace Gallery. In both venues, Rovner’s compelling formats vary. The video-based tableaux predominate, but there are also several static images, printed on paper,Cipher 2 (2018), for example, that resemble  barcodes or smudged lines from a typewriter. There are video-based sculptural works and a full-room video installation, Mechanism (2018). The immersive experience of this last piece, though silent, synaesthetically conveys a visualization of static sound in the sudden shifting of the small black figures. Like Mechanism, but in tableau format, Matches 2 (2018) also features the abstracted human blobs, this time red instead of the ubiquitous black and white. They gesticulate like specimens trapped behind glass that are aware of being watched. The forms become an eye test: You try to make out letters or some recognizable hieroglyph within the constant movement, but the wiggling, blurred digits resist definition.  

In Urgency (2017), where the shapes are still writhing and waving, red splays across their blurry heads like a heat signature – splotchy and angry. These figures, in contrast to the vaguely  comical, insistent buoyancy that pervades the rest of this show, appear desperate, whether or not they know they are being targeted.

Elsewhere, the abstracted forms act like language. Take Gmara (2018), for example. This consists of a vitrine encasing a projection on stone tablet in which the person-smudges operate like lines of text. Gemara is the analysis and commentary section of the Talmud. This title, like so many of others in the show, complicates the meaning of the piece, casting not only archival, but also religious connotations. This referentiality, as well as the distinct line work that separates the blobs, connects “Evolution” to Rovner’s larger body of work by evoking  political and social issues: separation through borders and conflict, individual and societal relationships, and human migration. The restrained movements of the figures, as well as the lack of obvious personhood and individuality, might bring to mind the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, a topic on which Rovner (who is Israeli) has worked before, as in Makom (Place), 2006, which used rubble from both Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods to create a new structure.

The proliferating interpretations brought to mind by Rovner’s abstracted forms complicate the title of the show. Does “Evolution” refer to human evolution, as in the growth of either an individual, a society, or a species? Or are we in the political realm, confronting issues of shifting alliances and leadership? Or perhaps there’s a quip here about a lack of evolution: human stubbornness, with the same indistinguishable blobs bouncing back and forth without making progress. Rovner’s rhythmically meditative and yet thematically challenging works encourage the kind of slow looking that allows for multiple interpretations. Her morphing forms legitimize each of these possibilities, as well as others.

At both venues varying dimness in the lighting creates spaces for thoughtful contemplation, as well as a mood which ultimately turns the viewer into a kind of embryo, allowing us, too, to evolve.

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There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

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June 14 to July 2, 2015
334 Broome Street (between Chystie and Bowery)
New York, 212 334 5200

An illuminated metal sign that spells the word “CHANGE” hangs in the K. storefront. K., the alter ego of the P! exhibition space, has taken over the gallery from March through July of 2015. K., which stands for the first letter of the gallerist’s last name (Krishnamurthy), as well as the value of a thousand (in dollars), presents a series of shows that focus on critical questions in economics, art, and the production of value.

The fifth exhibition in this series, titled “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” was Michal Helfman’s debut solo show in NYC. Helfman, an Israeli multidisciplinary artist based in Tel Aviv, is known for creating works that involve dance as well as stage design, symbolically using the stage as a way to reveal what occurs behind it, in the backstage.

Here, the front space acts as a money exchange. The clerk (Mr. Krishnamurthy or other representatives of the gallery), greets visitors from behind a glass window. The visitor is obliged to interact with the designated clerk, who explains the exchange rates: only Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, and Lebanese currencies are available for exchange in the rate of one to one. Any individual paper bill is exchanged for another paper bill, regardless of currency rates.

A beaded curtain — made of metal piping, Mediterranean shells, ceramic prayer beads, Hebron glass beads, plastic skulls, and walnut shells — connects the front space and the back of the gallery. In the rear, an entire wall is covered with a Jordanian woven black-and-white mat, while nearby hangs an acrylic-and-oil-pastel drawing on paper, titled One Dollar (2013). The drawing depicts an image of the pyramid that decorates the American one-dollar bill. This iconic symbol, adapted from ancient Egypt, traces the transition of empires. Egypt, one of the first nation-states is now a third-world country suffused with conflict and uprisings, while the U.S., a relatively new nation, is currently a powerful country that has great impact on the destiny of Egypt and other Middle East countries.

In the center of the room, two stools and a small table are a setting for a backgammon game, which includes dice that were created in Syria using a 3D printer. In conversation with an Israeli humanitarian who smuggles aid to Syria, the artist was able to secretly import these objects into Israel. Apparently, it is common that the back of exchange bureaus around the world is used as a smuggling point. Backgammon, a popular game played in almost every household in Israel and in surrounding Arab countries, was developed from one of the oldest games discovered in the city of Ur (in modern day Iraq). Similar games were common and identified in Egyptian pyramid drawings and from archeological relics of the area. On these Syrian dice the artist engraved the rephrased sentence “we will not forgive we will not forget” which is connected to the Jewish Holocaust and currently very much identified as the slogan for the hacktivist entities Anonymous. This game of luck and tactics correlates to the fortune of so many people, including refugees in the Middle East today. Supporting this notion is % (2013), an eight-minute choreographed video in which five dancers perform a recurring routine and represent the fact that one out of five people in the world today is displaced.

Finally, an abstract metal sculpture titled Attention (2015) is a human-size Minimalist depiction of a man with a rifle. The weapon points towards the glass window that connects between the front and the back of the gallery, and it is “charged” by a rubber band. Underneath one of the sculpture’s legs is a fold of stacked $100 bills, tempting the viewer to lean down and grab the cash. However, once the money is removed the sculpture loses its balance and the gunman shoots. This temptation is of course a trap as well as an allusion to the money at stake in politics and in the relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East. There is a constant flow of events that influence the future of war and peace in the region, many of which may occur off of our radar, and most of which involve the confluence of money and power.

The show’s title contains a cautionary alert: “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” brings these objects together to emphasize our personal responsibility. The title points at the economic crisis in the area due to ongoing conflicts — hence a struggle to survive. According to Abraham Maslow’s psychological pyramid theory, most fundamental levels of needs are at the base and include physical requirements for human survival (as food, water and shelter), while self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid and is achieved only after all other needs are fulfilled. As residents of today’s “empire” we have the capacity to pay attention and to make significant changes in the world. What is then our moral responsibility towards the various conflicts in the Middle East? What is our role, and what do we choose to give our attention to?

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January 8 through February 14, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

Years ago I watched a puzzling documentary about a Billy Graham crusade in Brazil. A shot of a plane towing an advertisement for the event over a beach crowded with half-naked bodies left me wondering what attraction evangelical Christianity had in this land of exuberant physicality. Apparently plenty, as shown in Yael Bartana’s film Inferno, on view along with True Finn at Petzel in New York (January 8-February 15, 2015). Together, these works challenge conventional ideas of how people of a certain nationality are expected to behave.

On the border of fiction and documentary, Inferno (2013) re-enacts ancient Hebrew temple worship, using a full-scale replica of the Temple of Solomon created in Brazil by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). Worshippers dressed in white linen faux-biblical costume and led by a flamboyantly-attired Black high priest gather at the site. Helicopters swoop in to deliver an altar and giant golden menorah, similar to the one carried off by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago.

The devoted flock that arrived with goats and chickens to offer to God soon discover that they are to be the sacrifice. Suddenly the Temple is engulfed in flame, killing most of the participants. After the conflagration, the film re-enacts modern times, where the faithful place notes in a replica of the ruined Temple wall while tourists sip cold drinks from menorah-emblazoned melons.

If Inferno tells the story of one culture planting another within its borders — a kind of Disneyland Jerusalem within Brazil — True Finn (2014) tells the story of people planting a culture within themselves. Created by Bartana for the Finnish contemporary art festival Ihme, this film records the results of a gathering arranged by the artist, in which she asked several naturalized Finnish citizens to discuss what it means to be a “true” Finn. The event takes place at a lakeside cabin in the north — a kind of “holy of holies” for Finnish culture.

In the process of the experience, Finns of Japanese, Estonian, Somali, Quebecois and Roma descent reveal basic problems of citizenship in the modern world. Discussing discrimination, one begins, “I feel like a Finn, I’ve lived here a long time, but when I go into a shop…” The group then enacts a scene of discrimination. Bartana further captures the ironies of outsider status by intermingling footage from classic films that embody national mythology. We see blond-haired, blue-eyed Finns in folk costume from the film Sampo (1959), and then cut to the darker-skinned Somali participant Mustafe wearing the same outfit. Later Mustafe dons Muslim garb as he offers daily prayers in the midst of the frozen lake.

Participants engage in typical Finnish activities: eating hearty stews and lingonberry sauce, ice fishing, sitting in the sauna. They cite adopted habits, e.g. “sulking” and “wearing black” as evidence that they have been integrated into the culture. They compose a new national anthem for their country and design a new flag, exchanging Finland’s severe dark blue cross for flowing bands of white, azure and green against a yellow background.

Bartana’s videos get to the heart of the problem of citizenship and culture in a democratic society. If, to become a part of a nation, one need only pledge allegiance to its laws, how can we say that one person more authentically of that place than another? If an Estonian, a Roma, and a Quebecois absorb the trappings of Finnish culture and learn to speak its language, shouldn’t Finland absorb them? And conversely, if a group in Brazil builds its own Jerusalem, how can we consider it less authentic than the one in the middle east?

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