Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Eli Petel (Eliyahu Fatal), Airplane
Such is the charged context within which Eliyahu Fatal presented his site-specific work היהיה(Hayihyeh?), a satellite installation of the artist’s solo exhibition Broken Cisterns, which was curated by Leah Abir and Rotem Rozental and housed at the American Jewish University’s Platt and Borstein Galleries from August 26 to November 12, 2018. The artist arranged a series of vertically stacked plastic beads in a grid that cut across the House’s internal and external terrain. With coy indifference to the stark concrete walls, the points marked by the beads on the hilltop’s uneven grass and cement foundation sketched out the five letters of the unusual and esoteric Hebrew word, hayihyeh.
Fatal’s movement from Jerusalem to Los Angeles retraces Bardin’s own journey, from Haifa, where he taught at the Technical Institute, to Southern California, where he settled and launched his creative experiment. Their layered routes seem confusing at first. On the one hand, they reverse the transit that typically, in Zionist mythology, directs Jewish movement toward the land of Israel. On the other hand, their movement from East to West recapitulates Zionism’s Eurocentric posture. So, does this site in the Simi hills represent Zionism’s negation or its fruits, its affirmation or its excess? While the House certainly takes Jerusalem as its point of reference, it is most publicly recognizable as the Command Center in the children’s TV series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the citadel from which “five teenagers with attitude” defended planet Earth against an alien sorceress. The desert frontier that links the site with contemporary Israel thus becomes entangled with the juvenile bravado of sci-fi adventure, making the House a reluctant bricolage of the sublime and the popular.
Fatal’s movement from Jerusalem to Los Angeles retraces Bardin’s own journey, from Haifa, where he taught at the Technical Institute, to Southern California, where he settled and launched his creative experiment. Their layered routes seem confusing at first. On the one hand, they reverse the transit that typically, in Zionist mythology, directs Jewish movement toward the land of Israel. On the other hand, their movement from East to West recapitulates Zionism’s Eurocentric posture. So, does this site in the Simi hills represent Zionism’s negation or its fruits, its affirmation or its excess? While the House certainly takes Jerusalem as its point of reference, it is most publicly recognizable as the Command Center in the children’s TV series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the citadel from which “five teenagers with attitude” defended planet Earth against an alien sorceress. The desert frontier that links the site with contemporary Israel thus becomes entangled with the juvenile bravado of sci-fi adventure, making the House a reluctant bricolage of the sublime and the popular.
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