Latifa Echakhch: "Saïd's Tea"
17 Feb 2010
Dvir Gallery is happy to invite you to the opening of the exhibition:
Said's Tea
Latifa Echakhch
Wednesday, 17.2.10 at 20:00
11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv
In the presence of the artist
The works of Latifa Echakhch are a refreshing proof of how art can be communicative and socially educational without patronizing or exploitative. Echakhch's sculptures are very elegant and delicate, but the viewer shouldn't let her discreet sensitivity in examining issues such as culture, geography and personal and collective history be deceptive.
She explores these systems through banal objects, images and situations and through the issues of social and political debate. These readings may not be immediately obvious but are clearly identifiable if you choose to see them, although look harder still and they will make you question the certainties they initially seemed to promise.
The visual and conceptual power of her combination of minimalism and Romanticism is potent, and what comes across is a fundamental belief in the dignity of subjects, even in her most severe critical moments. This achievement is largely ascribable to Echakhch's gift for taking the best out of the materials she chooses. Ordinary item like sugar cubes, fragmented carpet and broken tea glasses are converted into silent testimonies of sentiments like melancholia, anger, and a sense of disheartenment toward failed utopias.
"Saïd's tea" relates to a gesture of Saïd, the artist's uncle, who has a habit of putting a small teapot under the gutter of his house in Khouribga, Morocco, where he lives and works as a geologist at a Phosphate mine. When his teapot is filled with rain-water, he can prepare his "special tea". The artist was fascinated by this personal tradition, and wanted to make a tribute to this poetic ordinary element by installing a gutter able to collect rain-water into a small individual teapot that she found in Jaffa. As the weather is similar in Tel Aviv and Morocco, the expectation for rain will continue during the entire period of the exhibition.
"Babel Tour", is a well known wood game, every tower is built by taking the basic elements in order to be able to continue building it higher, until the moment when the progressive fragility makes the construction fall. The result is an ensemble of little ruins and fragile small building.
Recent exhibitions; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany; The Swiss Institute, New York; The Lyon Biennale, etc'...
The Exhibition ends: 27.3.10
Opening hours: Tues-Thurs 11-18, Fri-Sat 10-13
Said's Tea
Latifa Echakhch
Wednesday, 17.2.10 at 20:00
11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv
In the presence of the artist
The works of Latifa Echakhch are a refreshing proof of how art can be communicative and socially educational without patronizing or exploitative. Echakhch's sculptures are very elegant and delicate, but the viewer shouldn't let her discreet sensitivity in examining issues such as culture, geography and personal and collective history be deceptive.
She explores these systems through banal objects, images and situations and through the issues of social and political debate. These readings may not be immediately obvious but are clearly identifiable if you choose to see them, although look harder still and they will make you question the certainties they initially seemed to promise.
The visual and conceptual power of her combination of minimalism and Romanticism is potent, and what comes across is a fundamental belief in the dignity of subjects, even in her most severe critical moments. This achievement is largely ascribable to Echakhch's gift for taking the best out of the materials she chooses. Ordinary item like sugar cubes, fragmented carpet and broken tea glasses are converted into silent testimonies of sentiments like melancholia, anger, and a sense of disheartenment toward failed utopias.
"Saïd's tea" relates to a gesture of Saïd, the artist's uncle, who has a habit of putting a small teapot under the gutter of his house in Khouribga, Morocco, where he lives and works as a geologist at a Phosphate mine. When his teapot is filled with rain-water, he can prepare his "special tea". The artist was fascinated by this personal tradition, and wanted to make a tribute to this poetic ordinary element by installing a gutter able to collect rain-water into a small individual teapot that she found in Jaffa. As the weather is similar in Tel Aviv and Morocco, the expectation for rain will continue during the entire period of the exhibition.
"Babel Tour", is a well known wood game, every tower is built by taking the basic elements in order to be able to continue building it higher, until the moment when the progressive fragility makes the construction fall. The result is an ensemble of little ruins and fragile small building.
Recent exhibitions; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany; The Swiss Institute, New York; The Lyon Biennale, etc'...
The Exhibition ends: 27.3.10
Opening hours: Tues-Thurs 11-18, Fri-Sat 10-13