Kölnischer Kunstverein

Etti Abergel, Naama Arad and Tchelet Ram, Julie Becker, Ursula Burghardt, Noa Glazer, Omer Halperin, Gizela Mickiewicz, Oren Pinhassi, Michal Samama, Nora Schultz, Noa Schwartz, Lior Shachar

Guilty Curtain is a site-specific installation made for the historical space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Inside the long transparent exhibition hall, a group show will take the form of a glass house. The artworks on display all rely on surrealistic notions like covering and/or replacing. These gestures, performed by artists on various objects and materials, do not end at a cul de sac. The wrapping of a toaster oven in sheep’s wool uncovers an entangled relationship – instead of the sheep being placed in the oven, the oven is devoured by the sheep. This mixture of material, words and categories alludes to a symbiotic relationship between the body and the object. While the modernist attempt to dissolve separations between inside and outside only ended up emphasizing the divide, what is disclosed through the collection of all these bodily objects undermines the architectural structure of the Kunstverein itself; as one will experience space, in this particular glass house nature is no longer an exterior.

The extensive group exhibition and event series brings together artists mainly from Israel with others from Poland, Germany, and the USA. In close cooperation with the Israeli artist and curator Naama Arad, a local and active art scene, which has formed mainly in Tel Aviv, will be presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

Curated by Naama Arad and Nikola Dietrich