Previous Vitrine Displays

Michael Liani
N/A
2023
Negative injekt, 111 X 108 cm

14.3.2023 – 14.7.2023

In his new work for Magasin III Jaffa Books Vitrine, N/A, Michael Liani exhibits a photo displaying four objects. Two hands and two prayer chains. At the end of each prayer chain hangs a logo, one that can be recognized even before the figure itself is absorbed. Nike/Adidas. Using only these four elements Liani exposes us to a collection of possibilities through which one can examine the world around us. Black/White, East/West, Holy/Secular, Art/Consumerism. Using humor to gently push us out of our comfort zone, Liani propels us to carefully review how deeply we consider our daily choices.

Dana Yoeli
Through a Glass Darkly

27.10.2022 – 3.2.2023

Although a quick glance at Dana Yoeli’s work, Through a Glass Darkly, is enough to realize that it is an imaginary theatrical scene, perhaps a scale model or a trick of another kind that combines these two, the eye still wanders, seeking for a structure, looking to establish a certain logic. The gaze scans the objects in a desperate attempt to connect shreds of ruins from the Parthenon, resting upon Doric and Corinthian order columns, backgrounded by a brutalist concrete wall in a modern architectural style. The horror emerges when among to the ruins, the viewer discovers several life-sized fingers as well as a classical sculpture of a nose, next to a miniature replica of the Elgin horse, that same horse that is named not after its creator but rather after Lord Elgin, who tore it from its origin in the Parthenon, and led it into the collection of the British Museum.

Into a 130 square cm space, with a title made of three-words, Yoeli manages to engage in a array of cultural references dated in different periods and disciplines, from theater and cinema through visual arts and architecture, and at the same time pull those out of the context in which we are used to seeing them. When Bergman’s film shares a stage with the ruins of Greek temples and a finger pointing at the horrific damages of colonialism, Yoeli forces us to confront questions regarding the identity of the forces that control the narratives told through these cultural assets. Yoeli signs the work with the words “to err is human”, and what could have been a consolation can also be read as an accusation.

Roni Packer
Zero Separation

7.7.2022 – 23.9.2022

Roni Packer’s studio practice revolves around color and paint, and the wish to bring forward the abundance of these two on a flat surface. In Zero Separation, Packer’s installation for Magasin III Jaffa bookstore’s vitrine, she takes a step back from her color practice to reclaim the surface underneath the paint. Instead of a brush, she worked on the raw canvas with an iron, highlighting the off-white cloth, creating a double-sided canvas piece. Packer never used red in her work, but in this mini installation she is asking to proclaim Polly Apfelbaum’s red*. She does that with one thin line at the edge of the raw canvas, a red seam which she uses to set a boundary. However, it wasn’t enough. Packer missed the paint. And so, at the foot of the canvas piece, she places a skin of paint, a surface without a surface. The perpendicular canvas and the horizontal skin of paint are two individual pieces, yet a complete separation is not an option. On top of the red paint skin Packer sets a sculpture of a circle figure.
“And, just as the outside of a Cube is a Square, so the outside of a Sphere presents the appearance of a Circle.” (Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott, p 65).

*Apfelbaum’s exhibition Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea is currently exhibited at Magasin III Jaffa, across the street from the bookstore’s vitrine.

Sivan Lavie
My lucky heart

21.4.2022 – 11.6.2022

Sivan Lavie wonders how she can expand a field for the audience, to gift them with an experience of space and breathing. Color and circles are part of her answer. Beat and rhythm of brightly colored dots floating in white emptiness create movement for the audience she imagines, like musical notes, and reflect joy, allowing an inner dance. Thus she creates another world, a parallel universe, more colorful and flowing than the one we already know.

Ra’anan Harlap
Ba’asa
Used construction wood, 2021.

20.1.2022 – 11.4.2022

Ra’anan Harlap hangs a wooden soccer ball in the air. It cannot be played with, and it is suspended in a location where a ball could not remain. It is all the impossible possibilities; all the lost hopes. Haralp names the work Ba’asa, after the big pond that used to accumulate in past winters at the Bloomfield Stadium area, and caused the cancellation of the soccer games, to the chagrin of the players and fans. Today, the work is exhibited at 17 Olei Zion Street, on the soccer fans’ way to the renovated Bloomfield Stadium. Rain will no longer cancel the game but hopes still hang in the air.    

The possibility of representing three-dimensional bodies in two dimensions has intrigued Harlap for many years. In previous works he presented aligned pits[1] and flat tables[2], created illusions using the perception of space. But this time he is doing the opposite: he is rebuilding the geometric body of soccer ball from the two-dimensional remains of building boards, his favorite material. 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons are used to revive the ball, which manages to fuse the flat wooden shapes into a lasting wonder and an inexhaustible object of passion.

[1] Pit, 2011

[2] Table, 2013