The exhibition presents works of art by artists from Israel that were photographed in various countries, all, including Israel, countries considered as Emerging Markets.
“Emerging Markets" is a term coined in the economic arena during the 1980s used as a new prism through which the world can be divided. The term served as a new adjective to describe countries other than the US and Western Europe, that until that time were labeled by the West as Third World countries.
Emerging Market countries, characterized by accelerated economic growth and industrialization, also emerged as an object of interest for the art world:
Art scenes that often had no representation gained attention and aroused unprecedented interest: Chinese art, African art, Cuban art alongside others, were “discovered” to be worthy based on the finest taste of the Western art world, although they were often very different from the ruling tastes and trends in their countries of origin.
In the economic world, interest in these regions is perceived as a new phenomenon, although all attempts to decipher the logic at the base of this growth failed, while its critics perceived this phenomenon as a direct continuation of Colonialism.
The exhibition presents works of art by artists from Israel that were photographed in various countries, all, including Israel, countries considered as Emerging Markets, with this arbitrary economic-geographic division serving as the guiding principle for the curator: the exhibition represents the economic division that impacts the way images are created in a culture, but in parallel also serves to delimit a world that is “non-Western”.
Thus, the exhibition deals with the tension between the ethnic and the universal, and with the boundaries of the Western fantasy. At times, the Western fantasy appears as an approach that is unfettered by shape, and at other times it seems like an organizing and rigid principle that is destined to recur and return to the familiar image.
February 6th to April 6th, 2009.
Exhibitors: Itai Eisenstein, Uri Gershuni, Ron Amir, Eyal Fried, Tomer Kap
Curator: Mayan Amir
Tmuna Theatre Gallery
Address: 8 Shontzino
