Tzfia Dgani, describes her newest exhibition, Part and Inheritance, to open at Art Cube Artists’ Studios in Jerusalem on January 22, 2018 at 7pm. This project was proudly supported by Asylum’s Small Grants Program.
Part and Inheritance is an exhibition created by artist Tzfia Dgani (Curator: Avital Barak). Dgani rented apartments in Warsaw through Airbnb, built installations from objects found in these apartments, photographed them, and then swiftly disassembled them, leaving the spaces seemingly untouched. Interacting with strangers’ private things in a country where she herself was a stranger, despite a strong emotional connection through her Polish grandparents, Dgani’s project explores the modern form of hospitality, the gray area of what is allowed and forbidden in a home rented from a stranger. Does the anonymity and the payment cancel any of the ordinary norms about how to behave in someone else’s home?
At the same time, the photographs are haunted by the expectation to find politically charged gestures in the installations. The viewer is left to wonder how much hostility to ascribe to the animal skull that sticks out its tongue in one of the installations; why two fur mats have grown horns. Are the watermelons, basking in the faint December light, happy in this new environment; have they come to stay, to reclaim this territory?
On the one hand, the installations seem to express a desire to be noticed, to make a point: “Do you remember us? We were once your neighbors.” On the other hand, the viewer knows that the owners of the apartments never saw these scenes. The question lingers: who is being addressed? The inhabitants of those rooms are more intimately touched by the exhibition of these photographs than anyone else. And yet it’s unclear that the installations have anything to do with them at all.
Tzfia Dgani is an installation artist who graduated from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Israel and abroad. She was the 2016 winner of the “Young Artist.” Her work is an examination of presence, of the conditions under which an artwork appears or disappears in the triangular relationship between the object, the viewer and the place of display. She makes site-specific installations and tests both the spoken and unspoken rules governing the buildings of cultural and political institutions, like museums, archives, the parliament in Jerusalem and the new bus station in Tel Aviv.
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the generous support of Asylum Arts and the Yehushua Rabinovich Tel Aviv Foundation For The Arts.
