Exhibition
Moshe Ninio, Patch
28 Apr 2018 – 14 Jul 2018
Address
- Goethestraße 2, Aufgang D
- Berlin
Berlin - 10623
- Germany
Tal Sterngast and Barak Bar-Am are delighted to announce the official opening of a new gallery: NBA
NBA’s first presentation will be the first solo exhibition in Germany by artist Moshe Ninio.
About
The two main works in the exhibition, Morgen (2010-2015) and Hole/Patch (1991/2009) lay bare the patch-like nature of all images: the act of showing always involves an act of deception and concealing.
In Morgen, two dark, vertical screens hang on the wall. A female singer‘s radiant face appears in the right-hand screen. Gradually a stage set emerges behind her, shim- mering slightly, the e ect of a latticework filmed slightly out of focus. The division of the televised footage into two vertical screens separates the stage set from the singer and negates the hierarchy between front and back of the stage, the image’s “figure” and its “ground.” The stage thus becomes one continuous surface in which the figure appears in the flickering space like a figure in a carpet.
The video footage of a performance by the Israeli duo Esther and Abi Ofarim that was produced for West German television in early 1965 and resurfaced on YouTube. The film was flattened onto a single surface, turned into an image and stabilized as such. The original footage has been digitally reedited to simulate a zoom-in on Ofarim’s lips.
This procedure is complemented by a “remake” of a segment of the stage set, formed by printing part of its televised image on a metal sheet. This supplementary organ, the work Décor: morgen_appendix, serves as the video work’s physical anchor. It is an image-object that charges the emptiness of the optical decor with metaphysical void; a relic of the ephemeral event.
In Hole/Patch the same photographic image appears twice. It is a photograph of a nomad carpet that appears first as a whole with a hole unraveled in its center. The second part of the work shows the same image cut into two parts that are pasted together in order to cover the hole and fabricate a false continuity of the carpet’s pat- tern. Covering the hole in this manual cut-and-paste manner exposes the back of the photograph’s frame.
The exposed framing in Hole/Patch, brings to light the back and the edges of the image, just like the stage set that becomes an object in itself, equal in its significance to that which it was designed to frame.
