Makom-Al-Makom_catalog-new

E25 Israel's textile industry under conditions of accelerated globalization. By now, the major part of Israeli textile manufacture has "migrated" in pursuit of cheaper labor to Jordan or China, leaving unemployment and social unrest in its wake. The massive loom, Sharabani says, is both a monument to the Israeli textile industry's heroic past, and a signal of its implication in the global migratory cycle. In this conjunction, I espy a radicant optimism. A thread of determination and hope runs between the creativity and resilience with which a refugee from Nazi Germany helped establish new industries in an old-new homeland during the 1930s, and the younger native Israeli artist who, half a century later, is committed to artistic production of international caliber. My discussion has elaborated upon a note of optimism inUllman's and Sharabani'sœuvresthat defies the unsettling aspects of the radicant condition. This is especially manifest in the divergent, yet kindred, ways in which they employ sand and earth, maintaining a delicate equilibrium between groundlessness and presence. Balanced between the insecurities of shifting ground, the transience of radicant enrootings, and the anxiety of displacement, Ullman's and Sharabani's art relentlessly asserts and reasserts solid borders and grounds. Under ever-challenging existential conditions, they weigh positive mass against negative void, and shifting against solid ground.