Liam Chambon, Installation view. Photo: Daniel Hanoch
Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series
Liam Chambon
24 new black jackets are arranged on hangers. We lift our eyes to them. We are experienced consumers, well-trained in the world’s finest malls, we immediately understand what we must do. We approach the rack, take in the newness and brush against the sacred.
In the heart of the temple of capital, Liam Chambon finds refuge. As if stranded in a country where culture was obliterated, where screening films has been forbidden, the artist encrypted his messages inside the soft lining of security guards’ jackets. There he stitched and edited 24 frames from two sources: subtitles of an austere dialogue from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal and images of a galloping white horse from a commercial video archive. This brief moment fuses a religious-existential apocalyptic vision with a visual world which is flattened to the point of meaninglessness. The knight in Bergman’s film makes his way home after years of combat in the Crusades, riding a horse through a plague-ravaged country, reflecting on the nature of death. The horse blinks, closes its eyes, opens them, and closes them again.
In the chosen dialogue, the knight, who has already witnessed all forms of death, is tired and bored even with himself. Out of this existential boredom, Chambon sets out to revive the commodity fetish as a shining screen, a last defense against the futility of life in a society addicted to the spectacle of death.
Through the row of jackets, two silver lions appear, hanging on a chain, swaying in an electric breeze, hypnotizing us into our next purchase. Here, too, Chambon blends the religious with the commodified, the fashionable with the mythical. The sound of the fan’s whirring is all that remains of the roar of the two bound lions, descendants of the Kingdom of Judah, symbols of power, albeit very small.
The spatial logic guiding Chambon is that of store layouts, combined with lessons learned from minimalist sculpture, both of which emerged at the heyday of Western liberal democracy: right angles, duplication, and a pretense of purity. This layout logic fails to vanquish the objects’ inner logic. The mythical bestial power of the roaring lion and the galloping horse are stronger.
Hillel Roman
Liam Chambon
2001 Born in Tel Aviv
Lives and works at Tel Aviv
Education
2019- 2023 B.Ed.F.A, Faculty of Arts (Graduated with Honors) “Hamidrasha”, Beit Berl College
Group Exhibitions
2021 “Machane Meshutaf 4”, Hamidrasha Gallery – HaYarkon 19, Tel Aviv. Curator: Ruti Sela
2022 “Machane Meshutaf 5”, Hamidrasha Gallery – HaYarkon 19, Tel Aviv. Curator: Ruti Sela
2023 Graduation Exhibition, Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts, Beit Berl, Kfar Saba. Curators: Barak Ravitz and Orly Sever
2024 “Lost Illusions”, Taar Gallery, Tel Aviv. Curators: Omer Sheizaf and Yoav Weinfeld
2024 “Being Different”, Elifelet 14, Tel Aviv. Curators: Shira Carmel and Adi Schwartzbard
2024 “THE WEEKEND”, Auerbach 10 Tel Aviv. Curators: Shira Carmel and Adi Schwartzbard
2024 ״The Elementary Particles״, Hamidrasha Gallery – HaYarkon 19, Tel Aviv, Curator: Ariel Gil Greenwald
Awards and Prizes
2024 Edmond De Rothschild Escort program
2023 College President’s Scholarship Named after Rafi Lavi, Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts
2022 College Dean’s Scholarship, Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts
2019 Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts Scholarship

Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series, Liam Chambon, Installation view. Photo: Daniel Hanoch  

Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series, Liam Chambon, Installation view. Photo: Daniel Hanoch  

Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series, Liam Chambon, Installation view. Photo: Daniel Hanoch  

Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series, Liam Chambon, Installation view. Photo: Daniel Hanoch