מאמרים נוספים

Tattoo Representations in Contemporary Art | Ben-Gurion University Gallery | Curators: Yasmin Bergner and Haim Maor

A new social trend is currently emerging that warmly embraces the tattoo genre and recognizes its importance. The Tattoos exhibition presents works of art by artists from Israel and abroad who relate to the act of tattooing in various ways of expression and reveal the variety of internal motivations for tattooing in the context of defining personal, national, gender, social, cognitive and spiritual identity.

Ancestors | Group Exhibition | Binyamin Gallery Tel Aviv | Curator: Yasmin Bergner

The exhibition focuses on the ancestral aspect of the tattoo. Tribal cultures are structured in concentric circles, much like the rings of a tree. The individual is situated at the center, enveloped by an outer circle surrounding them: the collective tribal system. This social circle is wrapped in yet another outer circle: the socio-religious system, which expresses the tribe’s cosmogonic and mythological worldview. The tribal totem is an archetypal visual representation of the culture—the focus and heart of the tribe—serving as a collective ancestral tool for personal and social empowerment. It attracts cellular renewal, infinite creation, and a connection between the past and the future. The totem is a dual representation: the founding male/female pair, whose pairing creates culture. The mythical graphic themes that adorn the tribal tattoo are patterns drawn from the totemic language (which is the universal grammar—the symbols and archetypes of the culture). In this context, a tattoo is a kind of “personal totem.” A talisman of memory and an object of empowerment. In the tribal world, a tattoo is part of a shamanic rite of passage and initiation, throughout the stages of life.

Tattoos | The Human Body as a Work of Art | Museum | Curator: Yasmin Bergner

Since the dawn of history, the tattooed body has been a means of glorification and personal and collective definition of man. The art of tattooing has its origins in traditions of shamanic rites of passage and initiation in indigenous cultures; every tattoo work around the world contains within it pieces of culture and history and also embodies personal, social, ecological and spiritual values.

שיתוף

Ob | Mashuna Gallery | Yasmin Bergner | Esther Cohen Skin | Assi Meshulam

Here is the English translation of the exhibition text, maintaining all HTML tags, image source codes, and layout formatting as they appeared in the original.

Group Exhibition and Co-Curatorship:

Yasmine Bergner, Assi Meshullam, and Esther Cohen-Skin

Meshuna Gallery, 112 Herzl St., Tel Aviv, 2012

The myth has always been present behind the scenes of every style and era in art. The recognition of the timeless quality of the myth does not indicate a sentimental or utopian longing, but rather points, in a sober and measured manner, to the fact that something eternal is always present, even if hidden, and allows it to be an inseparable part of the visual and mental richness of contemporary art. This is a direct statement, free of nostalgia or bias.

The Exhibition:

We must lend an ear, respond, and recognize the importance and vitality of the myth’s constant presence. The human cultural infrastructure changes frequently; it is a flexible space based on our memories and our private and collective consciousness. Culture always looks simultaneously at the past and the future and influences us as individuals and as groups. The artists seek to create private and interpersonal connections to the myth, the symbol, and the archetype, to the histories etched genetically and consciously into our collective memory, and to pour new and relevant content into them.

The authentic or false faces of history change and dissolve in the broad perspective of thousands and millions of years. Political poles blur, and what remains is the symbol and the archetype acting as a key.

The artists seek to use these raw materials as a playground, each in their own unique way, in order to turn them into a discourse present in the “here and now.” We seek to dismantle the master narratives that have been passed down to us throughout the ages.

We seek to question and investigate visual representations, the meanings and implications of changing cultures. To understand our different personal experiences in relation to them, and the influences of memory or cultural amnesia that have piled up one upon another throughout history. To listen, decode, and respond to the personal call awakened in us by the primal.

May 2014

Yasmine Bergner

Yasmine Bergner is an artist, tattooist, curator, and researcher of tattoo cultures. The various media in which she works are drawing, sculpture, performance, and tattooing, which today stands out as an independent artistic field. The diverse media influence and bleed into one another, creating a discourse that longs to connect and bridge cultures and languages, the primitive and the modern, the intellectual and the spiritual.

Her training as a tattoo-artist led her simultaneously to specialize in drawing and woodcarving, and to years of independent research and writing on tattoo cultures and sacred geometry. In non-Western cultures, tribal artists were (and sometimes still are) accustomed to carving their tattoo stamps and tribal totems in wood. The close connection between tattooing and carving gained synchronic meaning and relevance for Bergner through the independent research she conducted in parallel with her artistic work. Outside of the West, woodcarving is considered a traditional art reserved for men. The artist takes ownership of this creative field, and under her hands, it becomes an act of personal freedom, a connection to the power latent in the tough physical act of carving—a connection between femininity and masculinity.

In performance, she strives to contain timeless symbolism, spiritual processes embodied in an iconic bodily image. Does the body hold the image, or vice versa? For her, this is an action that strives to awaken mythical forces and anchor them in our lives with the goal of empowering them and filling a missing spiritual void.

Installation view, Photos: Sigal Colton

Staircase Totem, Nimrod’s Mother, and drawings, installation view

Holyland, Zohar and Seleni in the Holy Land, pencil on paper, 2014

She Saw Everything, pencil on paper, 2014

Our Reflection, pencil on paper, 2013

Staircase Totem, Nimrod’s Mother, carved pine wood, 2013-2014

Photos: Sigal Colton

Harp Mandala, amplified musical instrument, carving – Yasmine Bergner

Musical planning and implementation – Amit Tiefenbrunn, Artistic Director of the Barrocade Orchestra Israel

Esther Cohen-Skin

She is a multidisciplinary artist working in the media of digital drawing, embroidery, sculpture, and text. In her complex work processes, impressions, symbols, and texts documenting a life period and state of mind solidify into a whole. The images and texts are rich in unique contexts that become personal archetypes for the creator.

Cohen-Skin strives to create new lyrical connections between symbols, thus changing their meaning into a new narrative, a new language, which stirs within a wide artistic field of action, calling on the viewer to decode a world of states, sensations, and thoughts with internal logic and poetics. Her series of painting/embroidery works reveal an engagement in a meditative action usually associated with traditional female labor. Images made with analytical precision that draws from digital language emerge, out of a striving for pure and accurate aesthetics, the “line” as a value, as a path. The unique medium transforms the works; the enigmatic images evoke a desire for tracing and searching, and reflect their metaphysical conductivity precisely through the “craft” quality of the works and the tangible presence of the hand.

Installation view, Photos: Esther Cohen-Skin

Untitled, mixed media, 2014

Untitled, embroidery on fabric, 2013

Untitled, embroidery on fabric, 2014

Assi Meshullam

Assi Meshullam’s works deal with the space between personal and collective identity, the creation of personal rituals, and the soul of the person seen in all its beauty and ugliness through their own self-observation. His paintings, sculptures, text works, and performances strive to dismantle cultural taboos and paradigms. A new myth is built out of his unique perspective. Meshullam creates subversive inversions and transitions between impurity and purity, between darkness and light, and between reason and ignorance. His gaze is a penetrating social mirror of the human condition.

His imaginative creations exist simultaneously in different spiritual dimensions, between the high and enlightened and the low and base, and create a unique state of consciousness that strives to embody, connect, and redefine meanings of “good” and “bad,” spiritual and secular, sacred and profane. His work “Ro’ekhem” (Your Shepherd) is a fascinating and broad textual work of art that strives to create a fictional religious text, drawing inspiration from existing religious texts, adopting their archaic metaphorical style to create a poetic, subversive, and critical text.