The Israel Museum presents "Artists' Choices: Zvi Goldstein, Susan Hiller, Yinka Shonibare."
Through January 2011
The Israel Museum celebrates the completion of its renewed and expanded campus with three special exhibitions curated by contemporary artists Zvi Goldstein, Susan Hiller, and Yinka Shonibare. Drawn from the Museum's encyclopedic collections and united under the title Artists' Choices, this three-part presentation provides a fresh look at the depth and diversity of the Museum's permanent holdings in archaeology, the fine arts, and Jewish art and life. The three artists, each of whom also addresses the notion of how museums collect as an aspect of their own work, present deeply personal responses to the Museum's collections through installations showcasing hundreds of objects. Four new works have been created by Yinka Shonibare for his exhibition, which is on view in the Museum's new centrally located temporary exhibition facilities, Artists' Choices is organized by Suzanne Landau, Yulla and Jacques Lipchitz Chief Curator of Fine Arts and Landeau Family Curator of Contemporary Art.
Zvi Goldstein: Haunted by Objects
Israeli artist Zvi Goldstein brings together over 400 objects - ranging from masterpieces from the collections to everyday objects found in the Museum's offices and storerooms - in a dense floor-to-ceiling installation that challenges contemporary concepts of museum installation and curatorship. Evoking a 16th-century cabinet of curiosities, the exhibition juxtaposes prehistoric goddesses, African masks, and objects of Judaica side-by-side with Dada ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp, a sculpture by Donald Judd, and photographs by such artists as Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harold Edgerton, and André Kertész. Interspersed among these works are sixty-two short poems from Goldstein's book, Room #205, written following his experience hovering between daydream and hallucination in a Tel Aviv hotel room. The texts are linked associatively with the objects on view, and serve to elucidate hidden connections among them.
Susan Hiller: A Work in Progress
Drawn largely from the Museum's holdings in modern and contemporary art, American-born London-based artist Susan Hiller assembles a selection of 34 paintings and sculptures linked by a web of personal and associative threads. Within this new context of the installation, Hillel encourages the visitor to reconsider each work regardless of the original cultural meaning. The presentation includes works by a diverse group of international contemporary artists, including Christian Boltanski, Hannah Collins, Anya Gallacio, Erez Israeli, Anselm Kiefer, and Barbara Kruger.
Yinka Shonibare: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water
Yinka Shonibare, raised in Nigeria but born and based in London, has chosen over 200 works from the collections to explore ways in which cultures influence one another, while also highlighting humanity's commonalities. Grouped according to the organizing principle of the four universal elements - earth, wind, fire, and water - the objects in the exhibition are linked by associative and aesthetic relationships, as well as by the artist's signature focus on hybrids, combining distinct and seemingly disconnected cultural elements. Four life-size figurative sculptures, created especially for the exhibition, personify the four elements and reflect Shonibare's emblematic style of dressing figures in Victorian-era garments made from colorful "African" batik fabrics.
Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday 10:00 to 17:00; Tuesday 16:00 to 21:00; Friday 10:00 to 14:00
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