New Members 2010

Yael Ruhman and Simon Krantz have been working in collaboration for the past two years. Their current exhibition inhabits the upper floor of The Jerusalem Artists’ House; a historically charged space resonant with genetic memories of the historic Bezalel, when it housed the school for craftsmen. The contemporary exhibition spaces, constantly shifting in content and form, act  as raw material for the artists’ rendering.

By means of focused, minimalistic interventions, Ruhman and Krantz conceptually address the Artists’ House, exposing it as an independent, primary architectural space. Dislodging it from its concrete, functional and presentable context, they reformulate the space as a bare and pulsating installation.

Architectural sections, “strips”, placed in one room reflect the structure and causality of the ceiling above. In the central room, adjoining the three rooms of the exhibition, a repetitive mechanical gesture of the windows, creates a shutter, briefly connecting and promptly detaching the room from the outside, stressing the inverted quality of the rooms. The mechanism alludes to the fact that several of the building’s original windows were blocked in order to create a standard exhibition space, meant to insulate artwork from everyday life. The third work emphasizes the monastic white of the walls, exposing the “white cube” as a modernistic form lodged within the original structure of orientalist attributes.

The elaborated space emerges as an installation, a system that demands pause and reflection, in order to appear as a sculptural occurrence. Encounters and collision between space and matter, between the inner logic of elements introduced to the space and the space itself, breaches between elusive vibrations and sounds, and the silent space, gaps in scale between minor and massive intervention, between things that are imported from the outside and elements that exist within; all of these devise a dialect that incorporates codes from the language of sculpture and that of architecture.

It is a stroll along a path spanning from comprehension and preconceptions, to an attempt to subjectively experience the knowledge encompassed in the Artists’ House. A pursuit of the essence of a representative site within a cultural context and local connotation.

From an interview with the artists:

“We do not find there to be an absence, but an attempt to capture the space as a sort of obscure object that the set of clues can define. The search for the minimum is not about absence, everything is a presence, including air, gaps and emptiness.”

“The installation serves the concept because it is not one object but a constellation, therefore addressing a system. The system serves the concept by straining the elements that combine to signify the space and the encounter with it. It demonstrates the singularity of the space and of the experience of setting foot in it, and that both are subject to physical law. The physical doesn’t present itself condescendingly, giving the viewer an impression that he is entering a system that secludes itself from the world he left at the threshold of the Artists’ House, on the contrary, it renders itself to a coherent reading with the “outside” world…”