8th Exhibition in the 14th Nidbach Series: Side Walk

8th Exhibition in the 14th Nidbach Series

“Side Walk”, Noa Nahari’s first solo exhibition, continues her occupation with the issue of identity while exposing the subject as fragmentary.
Nahari operates in a site-specific interactive installation, combining different media – video, voice system and sculpture – that operates as experiential physical space and, at the same time, as metaphorical and conceptual space that comprises the ‘spirit of time’. Once meta-narratives cease to provide either a stable horizon or clear ideology in the aesthetic, social and political field, we are doomed to endless disorientation.
The floor in the Artists’ House’s lower hall is covered with bricks. While crossing the entrance, the viewer looses his/her stability while trying to move across the surface, which seems stable but turns out to be flexible – a sponge layer separates the floor from the bricks. From this point, the viewer will activate the work in an amusing tremble as in a playground, and will be maneuvered by an anomaly of perception and sensation. Voice and video images in the spirit of new-age (that are displayed in a cyclic ritual) guide the viewer to increased attentiveness and subversion of the expected state of affairs. The grey building block, so prevalent in the ‘country building’ industry, is a historical indicator, loaded with the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its appearance in the installation is ambiguous: as an elegiac sign of collapse in the burning atmosphere of Jerusalem, and at the same time, as a “poor” art object that is trans-located into a jovial and ironic tool, free of pathos.
Nahari suggests ‘playing in the margins’ as the answer for the lack of balance and equilibrium.

Masha Yozefpolsky, Curator