Eitan Ben-Moshe | Stargate

On view through August 28th, 2023, ACAC - Arad Contemporary Art Center

Stargate

Curated by Leah Abir

Eitan Ben-Moshe's new exhibition takes place in two spaces, the connections between which are many and complicated and which are key to the existence and development of the Center for Contemporary Art in Arad. Over the past few years, the artist has visited the city multiple times, devoting his time to wandering, photographing, drawing, and chance encounters with local people and their surroundings. This process gave rise to a new outdoor sculpture placed on the city's edge. This work is the second in a series of environmental sculptures, the first set near the artist's house in the south of Tel Aviv-Yafo.

The new sculpture combines Ben-Moshe's practice, aesthetics, and ethics with the monumental 1960s and 1970s iron and concrete outdoor sculptures installed in and around Arad, working with notions of desert viewpoints and Gates (e.g., Igael Tumarkin, Israel Hadany).

Ben- Moshe's new work is also a gate, but the artwork title places us in fictional, spacey, alien realms.

Like other works of the artist, this "Stargate" is also a unique combination of contemporary metaphysics and mysticism with ethics and materials that are only of this world: synthesized, artificial, and fake. This sculpture does not puff out its chest in front of an empty or utopian city space but produces one moment of presence in a wounded, urgent, and full of life space: The name of the exhibition, "Stargate," is taken from the story of Jacob's dream, which the artist perceives as "the first installation or the first performance described in the Bible." (בראשית, כ"ח, י"א)

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