Peleg Dishon, “The Pledge, Turn And Prestige” (detail)
Artists: Anisa Ashkar, Michal BarOr, Yosef-Joseph-Yaakov Dadoune, Peleg Dishon, Yoav Friedlander, Daniel Kiczales, Eli Petel, Dafna Shalom, Irit Tamari
In its usual sense, “makeup” means a layer on the skin used to form a mask, a perfect coverage that conceals, blurs, camouflages, or creates a “smooth” and homogeneous appearance.
This thin layer sometimes hides blemishes, flaws, and differences. It covers, or should we say it covers up what lies beneath it – the skin, which in itself consists of layers that serve different functions: the epidermis, the upper layer made of cells that multiply and merge; the dermis that transmits sensations like pain, irritation, and stress; and the subcutaneous tissue, hypodermis, made of loose connective tissue and layers of fat that insulate the body and regulate its temperature. The stratified structure of the skin as well as its coverage with a layer of artificial material (in their metaphorical sense) can serve as a possible entry point to the questions that the exhibition raises: Could there be a perfect coverage? Can we think of the concealment and blurring of the flaws of time, of the past, of history, through the figure of makeup? Through the figure as makeup? How would art go about tackling these subject matters?
The exhibition approaches the subject of makeup metaphorically, addressing the subterranean forces teeming in the layers beneath the surface and all types of fractures in their geographic, cultural, social and political sense. However, it goes beyond mere “thematic” indexicality, striving to incorporate the strange logic of its “subject” into its organizing principle: its syntax is collagist, based on disassembly and assembly. Such syntax eschews all methodical systemic and logical formalization. Fissured and fissuring, it points to the cracks and fractures between the realistic and the fantastic/fictional, the religious and secular, the ironic and tragic, the pleasing and painful, the poetic and political.
The project is co-financed by the Embassy of Israel
Honorary Patronage of the President of the city of Lublin