Gambler׳s Breath, 2014

Curated by Yael Keiny
The Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv

In the entrance space we come upon luxury cars driving upward. Two parallel adjacent lanes nearly bring into contact two women, seen each on her own lane. A capsule is created, taking off like a rocket toward the sky.

Right at the entrance we notice the door of a car jutting straight out of the floor in the inner space, and in the distance, a second door, gray, dark and shiny, as if a car was drowned and its internal space burst open. The car's cup holder was also cast off in the rupture, the glass of Coke it holds is intact and still sparkling, its ice cubes not yet melted. The nearby video shows a landscape, in which it seems like the setting sun has halted its descent and it continues to emit a gleaming light upon the still meadow, while the bugs carry on with their frantic movement.

Turning to the row of 34 photographs, we find that each of them has been marked with an X, Who is it who has bothered to interfere and

In the center of the gallery, the figurine of fertility keeps turning on her axis inside the tall rectangular alcove Attar has created for it. This is the only representation in the exhibition of art and of a faith that has survived for 233,000 years. The alcove is fixed within the gallery's square structural pillar, whose perimeter remains empty and around which the exhibit takes place. Thus it is accorded significance, like the Kaaba stone, a hub surviving and living in a contemporary world whose bourgeois values are brought to a strange and troubling extreme.

Yaron Attar creates a world in which the transient and the eternal enact a chaotic syntax. The works are essentially modified ready-mades taken from the realm of bourgeois consumerism. Such are the doors, the Coke, the video loop "Summer 2013," downloaded from an online database of visual effects, and the photographs Attar took apart from a found album. The video "Road Out," made with a smartphone, is similarly based on everyday technology.
Attar inserts values of consumerism, nature, and faith, and creates for them a wild common denominator. It is as if he stitched together samples from everything that already exists, in a kind of gambler's game. In the contexts and associations attached to these samples a kind of redirection is performed, so that the glass of Coke, for instance, represents eternity, of all things. Even the figurine sculpted by early Homo erectus was also taken from what already exists (volcanic rock) and modified artistically. It was adapted, at the time, to the spiritual needs of its creators, prehistoric humans, and made to function as a plea for eternity and divine grace.

– Exhibition Text by Yael Keiny

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