Daily Reports: Contemporary Israeli Video Art at the National Museum for Contemporary Art, Bucharest

Curator: Carmen Iovitu, The National Museum for Contemporary Art, Bucharest
Artists: Yael Bartana, Efrat Shvily, Orit Ishay, Hilla Ben Ari and Keren Yeala Golan

The first exhibition of Israeli video art in Romania at the National Museum for Contemporary Art in Bucharest is entitled Daily Reports. The curator Carmen Iovitu proposes a small selection of the fresh and resourceful image of contemporary Israeli video art, a selection gracefully combining the numerous connections between East and West, confined spaces or global zones, also combining different cultural traditions, at last, the artistic internal tensions between old and new.

Israeli Art, as little as it is known to the Romanian public, points towards the captivating channel of communication that transpires from the artistic process across cultures to the international news media. Despite the flux news that places Israel as a nation in a continuous news coverage on a daily basis, through Daily Reports the intention is to show that these artists are recreating scenarios out of pieces of news i.e. out of reality, creating an art that crossways a big diversity of artistic speeches, including not only historical or political discourses, but also poetical images, metaphors relating to the medical sciences, religion, the social and the humanities. Furthermore, after almost 40 years of women artists producing video art, this technique still ranges across the greatest diversity of discourses, including not only those of politics, the law and the economics, or the bureaucracy. From Dara Birnbaum to Pipilotti Rist we reach the poetics of Yael Bartana, Hilla Ben Ari, Efrat Shvily, Keren Yeala Golan and Orit Ishay commenting on important socio-political aspects of the Israeli society or on principles of life, associated or not with event-based stories but built in other contexts.

Orit Ishay participates with the series of photographs Lucky Numbers and the video Not Just Funny, Hilarious, that shows us the real life of a changing Kibbutz, as ironic as it may seem. Her works are very important for the image of the Israeli documentary photograph, for which Ishay is one of the most important representatives along with Miki Kratsman and others.

Yael Bartana’s work defines her as a complex artist, militant and poetic at the same time. A narrative configuration that includes zapping the plot into microscopic moments reveals crucial depictions of Israeli life as presented in Trembling Time and Profile, on loan from the Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam.

With Hilla Ben Ari we find moments where reality fails and memory and art reshape it, creating an infinite magic moment, a sort of confusion mixed with endurance and strength. Her Dusk and Dawn video use these strong and powerful poetic images.

Efrat Shvily’s work challenges the "happily ever after" message of children's stories, and displays her alternative concepts of the ability to love in a dignifying mode. Bride is a real story, both dramatic and ironic.

The same confusion, this time fragile and ironic, comes out in Keren Yeala Golan’s videos. There is a scientific playfulness in NGC – 6853, and a Botticelian mirroring of powerful Christian imagery in Nomina.

With the support of the Israeli Embassy in Romania, Daily Reports is the first major Israeli contemporary art exhibition on view in the National Museum for Contemporary Art, Bucharest.