Artis

The Center for Contemporary Art and the Curatorial Studies Program at the Kibbutzim College of Education are happy to announce the opening of 7x4.5, curated by Alma Sessler and Orit Gat at the Curatorial Studies Program Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Art. 

7x4.5 intends to measure the space bestowed upon the young generation in Israel, its focal point is the phenomenon of split apartments in Tel Aviv, where one large apartment is split into 3-4 smaller ones in order to rent out to young people. The split apartment does not question ideas of conditions and space, and thus, the acceptance of this density and reduction becomes, beyond the acceptance of a way of living, an acceptance of a notion of the space fixated in Israel, of limited space where privacy must be guarded, a space that should be owned. There is something in the denial of the surrounding, in the feeling of personal space that is in fact not so, that recreates the expression “small country surrounded by enemies,” so prevalent in Israel in generations past. The fact that the young generation of the renters is willing to be crowded is in fact a substantializing of history, a sort of cooperation with the sense of space belonging to the previous generation, the Israeli claustrophobia.

The splitting of the apartment turns the original apartment from an interior to an exterior – the hallway that was part of the apartment becomes exterior, a shared space. The result is a space that we have a hard time formulating – it is not the entirely interior, the apartment, nor is it the exterior, beyond the building. The split apartment made the hallway a no-man’s land, the plaster wall a frontier. It made the urban apartment building, the bourgeois ideal of owning one’s own home, a minimized to the national space. The link between the ideal of owning a home and the ideal of owning the Land of Israel is interrupted in the phrasing – the building is shared, the national space a source of conflict.

The phenomenon of split apartments in Tel Aviv is not new, but it requires further study. This way of living, the plaster wall dividing the apartments and hinting on the space’s past, reflects old questions rather than creates new ones. One apartment is split into a number of narrow cells, and thus undermines separations the modern world had taught us to expect: interior and exterior, privacy, border. We share our space and pretend that it is private; borders are no longer defined. The analogy to the national and political state is clear and evident.

Questions of space, place, and way of living are central in the local discourse. The goal is to exemplify that these living conditions are reflected in the works of art created in this time, and that they reflect this dense space, and the seclusion that the Israeli space creates. The works in the exhibition were created by young artist who reflect these notions in their works; all works convey feelings of temporality, of seclusion – in form and frame, there is an undermining of borders, and a feeling of retreat. 

The exhibition was titled 7x4.5, the size of the gallery. From here on we can only decrease.