Winners of the Competition of Young Artists in the Plastic Arts, 2018
Uriel H. Caspi | Ariel HaCohen | Yanai Kellner|
Exhibition curator: Inna Berkowits
Opening: May 2019
The exhibition of this year’s winners of the Hecht Museum’s young artists’ competition deals with the search for tangible evidence of identity. The three winning artists turn to the museum’s archaeological collection as a source of inspiration in the search for signs of belonging to place, society and culture. The collective identity they look for is difficult to locate in these negativistic times. It avoids clear definition and dissolves before our eyes. The way to anchor that elusive identity is to stage an archaeological act. Discovery of an archaeological find can be perceived as an almost magical event, exposing material evidence of a cultural continuity that spans millennia.
The works in the exhibition seek to examine that very archaeological axiom. The use of archaeology outside of its original context, as an invented or imagined act, allows the artists to question the undisputed authority of the material find, to plant roots in the past and at the same time cut them down.
Uriel H. Caspi received his BFA from the Department of Ceramic and Glass Design of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 2018. Caspi uses clay to link ancient traditions and the multi-disciplinary work of contemporary art. The archaeological site and landscape are the source of inspiration for his work and serve as a metaphor for his artistic practice. The levels and layers of his personal life are revealed like the strata of an archaeological tel and expose an intriguing and multi-faceted story. His work is within the realm of a modern archaeology that allows him to reveal his inner world, the circles surrounding him and to examine the points of contact between his world and the viewer’s.
Ariel Hacohen is a fourth year undergraduate in the Department of Photography of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. HaCohen sees the medium of photography as an exclusive tool that enables examination of the gap between reality and its representations. His work deals with the dynamic way objects accumulate and shed meaning, be it historical, cultural or religious. Through the imitation of scientific photography, appropriation of archival photographs and artistic collaboration with local research bodies, he seeks to raise questions about the stories framing the material reality that surrounds us.
Yanai Kellner is a third year graduate student in the Department of Fine Arts of Haifa University. Kellner uses concrete, plaster, clay and wood to create fabricated memories of a lost world where spirits, monsters, gods and magic frame the story of everyday life. In Kellner’s imagined, lost world, gods walk among mortals and embark on heroic journeys with them. The archaeologists of his world spin tales of hidden worlds and cultures. Kellner’s works deal with questions about archaeology’s role in the Land of Israel and the connection between the practical and symbolic, political and decorative, historical and contemporary.