Curator: Yifat-Sarah Pearl
Imagine a world with spaces and environments that distance us from obvious interactions and known experiences, enabling us to look at .ourselves and our surroundings in new ways
Our body is an instrument of sensation. It receives external stimuli and translates them into sensations that serve as our foundation for making meaning. The better our understanding of the sensory realm — the relationship between our experience of external stimuli (how our senses respond to our environment) and our internal events (thoughts, memories, and emotions) — the greater our capacity for .introspection
Thus, our relationship with our surroundings — be they natural or artificial — can help us better understand our identity, our behavioral patterns, and the forces that drive and shape us. By paying close attention to our internal world and learning to understand it, we can deepen our understanding of ourselves and our environment and make more informed decisions about our future. To do this, it is sometimes best to move away from familiar spaces and predictable experiences. New and unfamiliar sensory experiences can open up new ways of looking at the world and ourselves.
The exhibition In-attention is an opportunity to have such experiences. Presented at the concluding conference of The Evolution of Attention in Modern and Contemporary Culture Research Group, part of the Mandel Scholion Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the exhibition seeks to challenge our ability to direct our attention inwards and outwards by inviting us to wander through the worlds of two artists: Avivit Segal and Yehudah Roth. While each of them walks a different artistic path, both tread the line between inside and outside, natural and artificial, construction and deconstruction, and both create spaces out of the images, ideas, memories, and emotions that result from processes of attention and deep focus. These spaces and the objects they contain and consist of represent a displaced past that relates to the present and affects the future.
The exhibition revolves around objects that open up spaces where the unseen is made visible, enabling visitors to have interactions that lie outside the scope of the known and familiar. Outside the gallery, two new spaces represent the circle of life and death. One is the site-specific installation Bare Bones, for which Segal collected skeletons and bones—a testament to the lives lived on this Earth and a symbol of their cyclical nature. Oscillating between presence and absence, this installation touches on mysticism and spiritual rituals. The second site-specific installation is Bread Wall, for which Segal meticulously wove loaves of bread in a checkerboard pattern. The power of this installation goes beyond the painstaking craftsmanship and the novel shape that resulted from it. First and foremost, its power lies in the reference to the essential food staple that nourishes and sustains us. In these times of upheaval and compromised safety, Bread Wall expresses a desire to reconnect with our roots and foundations. It reminds us of the circle of life and evokes thoughts of building and renewal as we look to the future. The interplay of natural and artificial surroundings and inner and outer worlds invites us to challenge the obvious by listening to our bodies and looking inwards.