Makom-Al-Makom_catalog-new

E5 At the epicenter of Place/Non-Place stands the intergenerational meeting between Micha Ullman and Ronen Sharabani. Sharabani's digital prints and virtual reality projections on sand tables stand next to works on paper by Micha Ullman. The sand tables are in dialog with Ullman's well-known iron and earth tables (which are not displayed at the exhibition). In Sharabani's works, the sand absorbs the digital simulations and documents their traces. In Ullman's work, the red earth might be steady or treacherous, and boundaries are tentative and fragile. Sharabani has set up a vibrating boundary in the gallery's colonnade: a kinetic site-specific installation created especially for this space. The works on display engage with the dichotomy between territory, boundary, and home as concrete material concepts and virtual space, where everything is possible but nothing leaves physical traces. In an era in which distinctions between the real and the virtual have become increasingly blurred, the sand retains traces of presence, but this presence is essentially transient, and therefore, laden with anxiety. In Israel, the experience of place, presence and home feeds on a collective trauma of uprooting and exile, as well as on the violent dispute over borders and land. In the Israeli context, as well as in the global one, the exhibition broaches issues of place and boundaries, presence and absence. Carmit Blumensohn | Hava Aldouby