"We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent reality." (J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash, Vintage, 1995)

A sunset, a stoning, a crash, a plunge, a breath. Yaron Attar's solo show at RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv lingers on such events and recreates them as situations through combinations of image and matter. A pair of sculptures, an installation based on a printed image, and two video works converge under the title "No Vacance" - there is no vacation, no vacancy; But perhaps this is just the beginning.

A clay male figure lies on top of a device, its mouth exuding steam. In this work, Attar reverts to archeological visibility and materiality and to the ideology surrounding it (same as he had done in works such as Herod's Forum, from 2013 [1] and Venus of Berekhat Ram, from 2014). The exhaling inanimate object and the mechanism that breathes life into the clay are the ones who are performing this shift from a mythic idol into a figure that requires approaching, that needs replenishment and is dependent on nothing more than a simple device reminiscent of a kettle.

A video, shot on the Aegean coast in Montenegro, peers from below at a band of children holding pebbles and stones. Boys and girls in a resort, in the sun, crowding around the stones, chasing a large insect. Their laughter and excitement all revolve around the possibility of squashing the invader.

Another video work takes vacationing to the extreme. Two men drive on desolate roads alongside other cars and the hills of the Negev desert. The drive, as always, suspends time and freezes it into a cinematic realm. The two cars come together in a severe collision, a rear-ender in which one vehicle is completely merged into the other, and both drivers are lying motionless in them. The work navigates among familiar visual representations of road crashes that had been charged with various radical and cultural meanings, from Goddard's Weekend to Cronenberg's Crash. Attar uses the crash not only as an image and a narrative device but also as a living, productive and flexible metaphor. The artist points to the collision as an almost romantic moment of union and release, yet one that insists on marking the banality of its very existence as well as its cinematic depiction. More than a catastrophe - a trauma of motion and standstill – it is a moment of new possibilities: to stop in the middle of a frozen hybrid space, to contemplate causes and consequences, touching and detaching, borders and their breaching, intent and randomness, masculinity and sexuality, what has been lost and what is created. [2]

This work, like the rest in the show, comes into being through negotiations between aesthetical syntaxes and expressions and physical experiences. The gaze and the body replace each other at the start and end points. "No Vacance," whose title already contains a double ending, seeks breaches and crises in regimes of borders, security, and the segregation of person and image.


[1] "The eclectic architecture of the hotel exposes the stylistic mobility between historically and politically charged monuments and leisure sites." (Doron Rabina, exhibition catalog, Current Affairs, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, p.18)
 [2] As Karen Beckman writes in her book about cinematic and artistic representations of car crashes, the crash creates tears in the membranes that are supposed to separate us, and so it is related not only to the death urge but also to the need to establish contact with the other. She also argues that "…[I}t is precisely [the cinematic crash's] unstable figure's uncertainty, its paradoxical suggestion of high speed and total immobilization, that resonates with the contemporary moment, in which we seem to be both stuck and unable to keep up with an ever accelerating pace, struggling to find a still, reflective place in which to think and from which to act." Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1-24, 233.


– Exhibition Text by Leah Abir