Living Fences
group installation

Living Fences “And when that night he climbed onto his bed, he was unable to sleep. He was in bed and his heart behind the fence. That horrible roar awoke repeatedly and sliced his brain. It no longer came from outside, from some other place, but from within him. All his bones were roaring. Noah got up and fixed his ear to the wall, the one facing the fence and next to which he sleeps. The wall is roaring, roaring, roaring loudly.” (translated from “Behind the Fence” by Hayim Nahman Bialik) Fences and window bars mark both partition and passage, barrier and opportunity, suspicion and curiosity. This double meaning inspires central ideas in the literary works “Behind the Fence” by H. N. Bialik and “Hedgerows” (literally “living fence” in Hebrew) by Dorit Rabinyan, where the main characters attempt to break physical, cultural and inner divides. Similarly, in Paul Celan’s poem “speech grille” simultaneously encapsulates the limitation, possibility and delineation of speech. In the joint exhibition “Living Fences” the artists respond to the divisions and encounters revealed to them in the neighborhood hosting the exhibition: they illuminate the clash between architectural styles, construction, refurbishing, road paving within the neighborhood and the erection traffic junctions at its borders, as well as the existential movement of varying communities that live together and side by side, within a faceted urban topography. This material, cultural and human fabric the artists chose to represent through a cubist and breathing space: it is saturated with angles and perspectives, borders and cracks, with degrading and durable materials, as well as with the silhouettes of figures living in the space and altering it. The gallery itself erects a border and partition between street and art, between viewer and artwork, but at the same time also invites passers by to dwell outside its window in the living heart of the neighborhood and to look inside it (without entering the building) and within themselves, and to momentarily skip above the events of daily life.