Parallel

Curator: Ayelet Hashachar Cohen

 

Shahar Afek creates a narrow space within the First Friday for Emerging Artists at the Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan with entry/exit passages leading to the original exhibition areas. The corridor-like space confines the museum space in reverse, cancelling its familiar-like presence and its focal point, re-examining its magnitude and position. A virtual corridor is screened in the constructed corridor, at the very end of which a video of rapidly changing landscapes is screened, impossible to grasp. Screening the segments of landscapes (photographed in Germany from within a train en route from Hamburg to Leipzig) opens a window to a world located outside the corridor, or one that exists within the viewer's consciousness. The viewer becomes a passenger to a place that is not a place, where time and space are bound.

 

"When I observed the raw material I photographed on the train in Germany, it reminded me of views that I did not experience in reality, but were impressed upon me after reading, hearing stories and watching films." The corridor/passage way is extended and serves as a waiting area, symbolizing the link between different worlds and opinions. It separates between interior and exterior, and is an introduction to the unknown. The corridor in Afek's work is rendered a construction that separates between the viewer's free consciousness and body, which is crammed between two walls. These contradictory perspectives create optical interference and a sense of infinity. And yet, the viewer is capable of exposing the temporary corridor construction and change sides to backstage, discover the construction that "grasps the corridor", organized like an empty library bearing an image of just one single book.