The paintings composing “Pending View” reveal a floating world, which, alongside the ephemeral installation, might gain an apocalyptic air. However, through the destabilization of the existing order, a new state emerges, one in which construction and destruction, or extinction and continuity, exist side by side. The figures seem to possess a twofold relationship with their fluid environment.

The installation stresses the paintings’ unified continuity. They hang from the ceiling, while creating an inner, circular structure in the middle of the gallery – a makeshift construction into which the viewer is welcomed to enter. There, surrounded by the large canvases, the viewer might find what he wished for – a balance, a focal point. This constellation is reminiscent of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological definition of the horizon. Husserl distinguishes between an “internal horizon” and an “external horizon”. The first includes the visible aspects of a given object – in this case, the inner sides of the canvases – the carriers of the image. The latter refers to the invisible aspects of the object – the outer sides of the canvases.

Through this installation, a shared horizon is formed: a mountain, a rope and a water body join together into a new panoramic landscape. Thus, the exhibition as a whole is an experiment in horizontality – the horizon might be missing in the works themselves, but is formed from their joint presentation. For the viewer, it is a paradoxical horizon – a round horizon, encircling him all around

A freedom, which is both terrifying and liberating, is the one taken by Maiberg in this series. The horizon allows fluidity and flexibility not just in terms of color and matter, but as a possible subjective movement in space. In this manner, the viewer, like the figures, finds himself hanging between above and below, here and there, past and future. The unreachable circular horizon allows a new and different linear perspective – a time pending

view.

Keren Goldberg, from “free fall ” the exhibition catalogue

A Woman Who Stopped

In the end, it is about movement. Like the movement that leaves the text open-ended, as if to signify the transcendence of time, the distortion inherent in the linear sequence. The annals of time begin with a different ending, and what takes place in us moves in opposite directions, stopping at the moment of being christened as an image. And here, we have a woman who stopped, and more than once. She confers her consonants on whoever is interested, in order to say something about the strength needed to be passive. This is her natural language, her diction, if you like. Her ideological movement is the movement of consonants, and in order to take the helm with her lips she must rub against edges, embody passive and active states, action and passion, man and woman.

For her past is strewn with beds, riddled with previously registered prostrations. “She is lying down, he stands up”, writes Hélène Cixous. “She arises – end of the dream – what follows is sociocultural: he makes her lots of babies, she spends her youth in labor; from bed to bed…”[i] What shall we do with this woman who insists on stopping in motion? The streams of water moisten her organs, whispering: “You have long been dispossessed of yourself,” but a recalcitrant habit makes her stretch up her legs, turning the crucifixion gesture on its head.

Her body rests on the cool floor with her arms spread out, like in an emergency instruction manual she once saw, warning against being trapped in quicksand. The head is bent back, the arms float, and only the legs are already sunk deep in the downsucking force. Surrender as a first, vital resort.

Now she pulls out her legs from the grip of the everyday and uses them to outline, almost unawares, a new vertical order. Her body delineates two contradictory paths – a perpendicular, structuring, organizing, hierarchical dimension, tolerating no interruption and containing all she knows, and a horizontal, expanding, all-encompassing dimension that contains her secret. Her confidants know the rebellion embodied in a rising which is not an erection, but an ever continuous, changing, diffusive flow.

How wicked is the joy that permeates her, her unseen gaze trained on her toes, become a horizon. She can almost speak, get reacquainted with the efficiency workers that gulp up the spaces of her life, generate the role reversal, the hovering that will be their lot. She teaches them to hold what is stronger than her, like a wave she has learned to tame, inhaling air into her lungs as if she were newly born.

In the end, it is about movement.

Dalit Matatyahu

[i] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 66.

In her new exhibition, Sea of Galilee, Orly Maiberg returns to the sea.  But the sea is not the same sea.  It is not the expressionist, devouring sea, nor the gentle twilight sea of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, so familiar to us from her earlier exhibitions.  This is the Sea of Galilee with its religious, cultural and national symbolism as well as a mecca for sports, holidays, fun.

What begins as the popular sporting event of swimming across as a means of instilling in us a feeling of common national goals –- so precisely described by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum –- suddenly changes.  It turns into defeat, persecution, escape, exile, into a search for a safe haven

The swimmers who begin their trek as sport become nothing but nameless survivors in its midst. They are crowded on rafts, elbowing one another on makeshift boats, trying to escape to an unknown future.  Their identity – if they have one – is given to them in the form of their number in the competition, whose rules have changed and now it is nothing but a trap.  The shores of the Sea of Galilee are not the shore that is visible on the horizon, nor the shore that is left behind, but a parallel shore – undesired one.

We leave them thus, abandoned to their fate, men and women with their roots in water, a mass, moving from here to there, from there to here.

– Ilana Bernstein