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Indepth Arts News:
"Noa Giniger"
2009-02-21 until 2009-03-28
Galerie Gabriel Rolt
Amsterdam, ,
NL Netherlands
Galerie Gabriel Rolt is proud to present the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of Israeli artist Noa Giniger from February 21 to March 28, 2009.
Noa Giniger’s work presents the tension between existence and essence. She attempts to turn “essence” into “something” that has a distinct, separate existence; one which can be located in time and space. At the same time she performs acts that take “objects”, not necessarily tangible, dislocate and modify them, undressing them from their defined meaning.
The subversive nature of her work appears through acts of dislocation and transformation. In EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY SOMETIME (2008) Giniger takes one line out of a famous love song, isolates it and presents it as an endless repetition. The “sometime” and the “somebody” which were concrete in the original song and referred to a specific time and person, become in Giniger’s work arbitrary, reiterative and repetitive. Nevertheless, this repetition obeys the song’s structure. The generality and arbitrariness of ‘this cycle’ are only fragments of a more complex picture. Similarly, the individuality and emotionality of the original song are only a one-dimensional semblance that conceals impersonal and alienated characteristics of the song. By the separation and endless repetition, Giniger does not only turn something which seems emotional and private into general and public, but also reveals that the binary division to private/public or emotional/estranged does not really exist.
The core of Giniger’s work takes objects (collection, image, synthetic light, sound) and transforms them into non-specific and non-functional entities. Simultaneously it is using chance and random occurrences (the movement of sun ray, passing cars) to firmly fix an existing entity. Modification and dislocation again have a subversive nature. In ON GOING COLLECTION (2008) Giniger places a collection of garden solar lights in a lighted showcase, replacing direct sunlight, which usually charges the batteries, with bright fluorescent. In doing so, the solar lights do not only lose their function and efficiency but also consume and destroy their batteries without ever activating them. By undressing the solar lights of their function, turning them into meaningless objects, insignificant artifacts, Giniger is also expending the notion of sculpture.
Suddenly, it is not clear if a sculpture is formed of an idea, an essence, or from the positioning of an existing object, either physical or abstract, in a certain time and space that creates/reveals a sculpture. This question is significant to Giniger’s work as she is dealing with materials such as light, wind and sound that do not have the shape of an artifact and the form of an object. In fact it is hard to locate her installations in time and space. Nevertheless, the difficulty to ascribe Giniger’s work a linear timeline and a tangible space actually enables a new form of space and time in which her sculptures can exist.
Giniger’s work is conceptual, established on facts. At one and the same time it is intuitive, emotional, random and arbitrary. It is using scientific inquiries and optical experiments that do not lead to outcomes or scientific conclusions. Through the implementation of existing structures and through the semblance of a rational or scientific inquiry, she reveals the breaches in the structures that she implements and the processes that she imitates. This tension is prominent and explicit in her work DON'T CONVERT THE SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM TO AN INSIGNIFICANT LOVE STORY (2008), for which a still from Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Solaris is projected. This sentence seems to serve as an entrance to Giniger’s work. It epitomizes and illuminates the subversive nature of imitation, dislocation and modification which occupy Giniger and are imminent in her works. (Avi Lubin)
Noa Giniger (1977, Tel-Aviv, Israel) received her diploma in 2005 from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. She completed her two years residency in De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2008. Recent group exhibitions in the Netherlands include ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’ in Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht (through De Apple, Amsterdam) and ‘Sun Shine Shine’ at the Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem. Also in Attitudes (Geneva) and in Paris in different venues such as La Général, Passage du Retz, Quai Malakias, as well as in Le Georges, as part of the Abstraction Surface Air program.
Avi Lubin is a teaching assistant in Criminal Law and international law at the Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University in Israel. He is currently completing his thesis on political trials, dealing with the confrontation of the law with political actions in contemporary society.
IMAGE
Noa Giniger
THE RISE & FALL
2008
Painted ceiling fan, light bulb
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