Dinner is Ready / Mise en Scène
Paula Elion / Liliana Orbach
Dinner is Ready / Mise en Scène
Paula Elion / Liliana Orbach
Curator - Nir Harmat
After long planning and preparing, the day has finally arrived!.
We are thrilled to present our exhibition Dinner is Ready / Mise en Scène to the public.
We hope that you will have a memorable experience.
Paula Elion and Liliana Orbach deal with the personal and collective memory as the raw material for their artistic creation.
They knead the memory and they toy with it. Their artistic handling changes shape, while is poured into molds of prior knowledge and hypotheses.
Between the two artists there is a dialogue based on aesthetic perception gaps - For Liliana Orbach the approach is critical, “styled”. It allows a broader view of the memories and the difficult content that it handles. By contrast, Paula Elion's artistic language is direct, involves household materials and, oppositely to Orbach, “warms” the dialogue, returning its statement to a domestic language.
The tension of the works is built from the difference between the image of a happy, pastoral family, and our prior knowledge, which knows of the atrocities from a retroactive perspective.
The randomizing of evil and trauma is brought by the works of both artists, but with a different, almost contradictory, language and approach, which is joint to form a dissonance on the one hand and on the other, an embrace in the context of language, conflict, coincidence, fate, creation and creativity.
Nir Harmat - Curator
Dinner is Ready
Paula Elion
Like you serve dinner to your family and friends, I invite the viewers to share with me this special meal. In this meal there is no food on the plate but scenes from family life.
Posing for the camera is Magda Goebels and her family — husband Joseph and their children. In these collages I arrange the pieces carefully. Layers of images and layers of meaning. These characters remind us of what human beings, “normal" people, are capable of.
As the author of these collages, made out of drawings on transparent sheets and book pages, using historical photos of the Nazi period, I intend to create something esthetic, an interesting composition, a beautiful piece.
But is this possible?
Can beauty be born out of horror?
We know that the end is tragic but we have Art as a tool for catharsis. It allows us to examine, dissect and rearrange the story.
PAULA ELION - Multidisciplinary artist / Explores the mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture.
BA in Arts, Midrasha School of Art, Beit Berl, Israel.
Born in Argentina. Lives and works in Israel.
For more information about her background and artistic activities:
elion.paula@gmail.com / http://paulaelion.com
Mise en Scène
Liliana Orbach
“It is only as any aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified.”
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of a Tragedy. 1872
Mise en Scène approaches a basic and ongoing dilemma that has haunted my creative process for many years, which is confronting me to the basic question that asks about my moral rights as an artist to relate and interpret atrocities using aesthetics as means of expression. As if, for the sake of art, one could see harmonic tones, within the ugliness of evil. As if, for the sake of existence, one would foreseen light, within the harshness of truth. As if, it wouldn’t be possible in any other way.
Mise en Scène presents five video works screened in two spaces.
In the first space it can be seen four of the works:
The Hunt, a big wall projection, depicts an ongoing walking/searching/hiding within a primeval, sublime forest, with no clear motive or propose, focusing on the viewer’s uncertain, apprehensive and fearful expectation.
Lullaby, composed by three small video screens, uses the beauty of melodious tunes and the flowing gestural expressions to portray a musical performance of obscure connotations.
The Count, a silent video work screened on a monitor, deals with time and order in a continuous, rigorous and systematic rhythm.
The Question, another video work without sound, which is also screened on a monitor, based on a dialog between two characters of Greek mythology, exposing disturbing aspects concerning the essence of human nature.
The second space displays work number five, entitled Mise en Scène, a video installation composed by two synchronized projections that depict two surreal landscapes of poetical, yet most disturbing character; a looping tragedy that surpasses the limits of place and time; a theatrical play of recurring beginnings and ends.
But besides any personal contemplation, the installation Mise en Scène aims to expose the subliminal and inevitable pleasure of aesthetic character, which arises as the artist’s creative spirit searches through the absurdity of horrors to find reasons; an imperative path that makes it possible to sublimate many unbearable facts of the history of the human kind.
