Željka Blakšic´ aka Gita Blak

Croatian artist Željka Blakšic´ aka Gita Blak explores musical manifestations of class and gender divisions in society. Whisper-Talk-Sing-Scream (2012–2013) depicts a group of adolescent girls with whom the artist worked, a type of spoken words choir performing protest texts in the streets of Zagreb. The texts were written by activists, artists, journalists, and poets with whom the artist collaborated, and they refer primarily to three disempowered groups in Croatian society: female factory

Tali Keren

Tali Keren’s New Jerusalem is a research project which gave rise to a “bureaucratic musical performance” at the monthly meeting of the Jerusalem City Council. A cantor sang parts of the codex of the municipal outline plan, Plan 2000, to the mayor and council members. The plan, which was never authorized but is nevertheless implemented in situ, is the first plan drafted in Jerusalem since the 1967 occupation and the annexation of East Jerusalem; the document refers

Irina Botea

In her video Before a National Anthem (2010), Irina Botea presents a collaborative process of writing a new anthem for Romania. A choir performs various works written and composed by Romanian poets and composers whom the artist approached, which combine texts proposed by hundreds of Romanian citizens who accepted the hallenge. The camera documents the choir performing the new “anthems,” lingering on the singers’ faces, as the rehearsals transform into negotiations

The Chto Delat

The Chto Delat (Russian “what is to be done?”) collective was founded in 2003 by a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of combining political theory and activism in art, and it aims for critical politicization of information. Its members frequently incorporate singing, while referring to Russia’s political reality and history. A Tower: The Songspiel (2010) is the concluding chapter

Marco Godoy

Marco Godoy’s Claiming the Echo (2012) offers a transition from the local to the global, serving as a second exposition to the exhibition. It features the Solfónica choir, founded in Madrid during the 15-M protest, which sings in demonstrations. Godoy shifted the choir from the public sphere to an empty theater hall and situated it in the traditional place of the audience, where it sings protest slogans popular in demonstrations of recent years, relating to the economic crisis in Spain

Omer Krieger and Nir Evron

Rehearsing the Spectacle of Specters, the title of Omer Krieger and Nir Evron’s video installation (2014), are the opening words of a poem by Anadad Eldan (b. 1924), member of Kibbutz Beeri on the Israel-Gaza border. Eldan – the “kibbutz poet,” who wrote texts for kibbutz ceremonies and festivals – is also a renowned, widely published lyrical poet. His poems have a unique sound based on rich and musical ancient Hebrew. The video documents a group of kibbutz members

Elie Shamir

The exhibition “Preaching to the Choir” consists of video and performance works, but it opens with a lone painting, Elie Shamir’s Lullaby for the Valley. Five young women singing in a choir are depicted in a plowed field, and next to them, a man playing the accordion. Doron Lurie identified a dual tension in this painting, and in the polemic of Eretz-Israeli painting in general, “one arising between idealistic-utopist description and mimetic-realistic description; and another

Leunora Salihu

Leunora Salihu’s works pursue classic questions of sculpture, such as the relationship between volume and surrounding space or between sculpture and pedestal. She translates handcrafted elements into serial, modular systems, with which she composes voluminous objects, thereby attaching to them connotations from architecture, furniture, and design. Salihu’s development of familiar forms is often based on human proportions or architectural prototypes of human habitation. As a symbol of temporariness,

Alex Wissel

Alex Wissel operates from within the local art scene of the Rhineland. In numerous art projects he has served as an entrepreneur, inviting artists and the general public to take part in the creation of communal self-staging scenes. As an act of extended hospitality, Wissel took in Jochen Weber during his 2013 residency in Tel Aviv. Both artists lived together in a small, congested room. A visit to the Absalon exhibition at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, featuring his inhabitation

Gil Yefman

Gil Yefman uses a variety of media – including knitting, weaving, sculpting, painting, printing, video, and installation – to challenge charged political and gendered notions. The works in the exhibition are based on photographs of mass graves in Nazi concentration camps. During his residency in Düsseldorf, Yefman painted elements from these images on ceramic tiles. His current works continue this exploration through deconstruction and reconstruction of the images in a repetitive pattern.