Tenantīs
Roi
Roi
Roi
Roi
Itamar
Itamar
Tenantīs

Tenants' Meeting

Roi Carmeli // Itamar Shinshony


Kav 16 - Community Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

 

May - July 2013 

 

The exhibition Tenants' Meeting offers a humane point of view on life – people, feelings, hopes and disappointments. The two sound installations featuring the exhibition, created following the artists encounters with Neve ELiezer's neighborhood residents, present the stories and voices behind the people that became raw material and a source of inspiration for the artists.

Experiment N.7 by Carmeli and Shimshony's Local Music Machine are low-tech sound machines capturing within themselves the soul and spirit of the neighborhood. Through these works the artists explored the relationship between sound (music), life and community and embody their interest to deal with the individual within the collective. Although sharing similar motivation, the technical and conceptual mechanisms of the works differ: while Carmeli's work preoccupies itself with memory and memorialization, Shimshony's presents hope and dream fulfilling. Input and output are presented – one machine absorbs the voices of the neighborhood residents (Experiment N.7) while the other emits sound (Local Music Machine). A circulation reflecting human kind composition – in its goodness, badness, sadness, happiness, hardness and softness is created.

Experiment N.7, Roi Carmeli, 2013, Sound and Video Installation (table, laboratory glasses, speakers, feathers and amplifiers). Carmeli bases his work on recorded interviews with elder people from Neve Eliezer's Day Care Center for the Elder, who revealed before him autobiographical anecdotes and personal stories. Their voices were unified and processed into one single soundtrack played by logarithmic computerized software through speakers and amplifiers. Different size speakers covered by laboratory glasses were filled with feathers. The produced bass effect presents a musical background for randomly chosen phrases taken from the recorded interviews and creates physical movement enabling the trapped feathers to flight within the laboratory glasses. The non-controlled selection of played phrases raise philosophical questions concerning a man's choice and control on his life (what do we chose and what is forced upon us, what we repress and what is released out). Along with the sound machine the video Starling is screened (loop, 1' 22''), an almost abstract black patch preserving continuous movement. This is a piece of sky flooded with non-stopping flying birds. Experiment N.7 is a sort of an archaic "feelings meter" – capturing and releasing spiritual and emotional tempests. This is an attempt to create an emotional intelligent machine able to experience feelings. (Irad Lee - Sound design and computer programming, Dan Bronfeld - sound recording)

 

Local Music Machine, Itamar Shimshony, 2013, Mixed media. Shimshony's work presents a local version of the American traditional jukebox sound machine from the 60' and 70'.  Shimshony created a song mosaic which converts in to one oeuvre – voices reflecting the neighborhood social composition and its heterogenic character. Rachel, Ilanit, Sammy, Abraham, Miriam, Tzipora and Simcha perform, from a wide repertoire, songs which are close to their hart, well and less known. Shimshony intentionally moves away from the elegant aesthetics of the original jukebox sound machines, choosing to use a formalistic and materialistic language composed by local motives such as color plastic buttons and little metal plates on which the singer's names are chiseled – a colorful aesthetic remainder of post boxes and intercom systems form the neighborhood buildings. Nonetheless the decorative richness, characteristic of jukebox machines remains – a system of flickering led color lights, seduces and invites the wide public to approach and activate the music machine which offers a variety of songs, a nostalgic integrated essence of joy and sadness. Local Music Machine restores the lost glory of the traditional jukebox that was replaced through time by newer technologies. (Gilad Fried - image & model design, Yair Uziel - electronics and computer programming, Eyal Weiss - musical processing and production)

For the last past three years Neve Eliezer neighborhood became my home. The neighborhood and its people stranded in the center of my curatorial thinking – nourished me and becoming a source of inspiration. I spent most of my energy and time to find the connecting point between me, the artists I worked with and the neighborhood and its residents in order to arouse interest, curiosity and create a dialog between the community and the artistic creation. Tenants' Meeting, my last exhibition as the curator of Kav 16 – Community Gallery for Contemporary, I dedicate to you – the neighborhood residents, for welcoming us with a wide smile and happily joined us, sometimes with a hesitated pace, to a different journey … a journey to discover contemporary art. Adjacent to Carmeli and Shimshony works a selection of TV magazines made by the regional Neve Eliezer –Kfar Shalem Community TV cable team is presented. These TV magazines, similar to the exhibition, focuses on the residents, their activities and achievements and reflects the unique concept of the local regional TV cable, established at the late 90's by the director and producer Nitzan Levi at the Neve Eliezer Community Center worked.

 

Curator: Sally Haftel Naveh

 

 

 

Experiment n.7 from roi carmeli on Vimeo.