Six Weeks of Live Art at the Museum. An exhibition based wholly on the living body will open at TAMA on 17 January 2023: a short-term, object-less exhibition, the first of its kind in the Museum. Artists, performers and choreographers participating in a joint endeavor to imagine a museum in which the living body is the central presence.
While the title “Imagine a Museum” looks forward, to the realms of imagination and dream, the subtitle in parentheses, “The Remembering Body,” returns to the museum’s foundations, in fact to the first institution titled a museum, i.e. the mouseion in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE. The mouseion was a library and an academy, named after the nine mythological muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosine (the Goddess personifying memory), who presided over various arts (none of which was plastic art). The idea of the birth of a museum from memory is at the core of the exhibition. With Mnemosine and the muses in the background, the museum is anchored within a distant, mythological and ritualistic memory, and adopts the identity of a remembering body: remembering its chronicles and histories, hosting other remembering bodies within it. A body within a body. A two-directional motion, forwards and backwards, towards the realms of imagination and the domains of memory, thus drives the exhibition, which takes place in the gallery and throughout the Museum’s public spaces.
Featuring live art in a museum, over six weeks, crossbreeds opposing formats: the performative-stage format and the exhibition format; theater’s black box logic and the gallery’s white cube logic. The classic format of an “exhibition” shifts and alters but maintains the unsolved conflict between a living body and an object-focused exhibition space. The attempt to shake the matrix while remaining within it leads to a series of activities such as dancing, teaching, talking, playing music, listening, reminiscing, therapy or meditation. Together they accumulate into a rustle of happenings and motion.
Participants in the exhibition:
Nelly Agassi — Nir Amit — Or Ashkenazi — Bat Sheva Dance Company — Beit Avi Chai — Gaga - Ofri Cnaani — Creatures of Dance: Yali Nativ & Iris Lana — Noam Holdengreber — Tamar Katz — Alit Kreiz — Dalia Kreid — Tami Lebovitz and the Youth Ensemble — Mor Leedor — Public Movement — Gal Nissim — Ariel Reichman — Tai Rona — Dana Ruttenberg — Michal Samama — Tino Sehgal — Noa Shadur — Shamans of Sound — Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor — Idit Suslik — Merav Svirsky — Vacuum Service — Yasmeen Godder Company — Sharon Zuckerman Weiser
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of:
Tel Aviv Municipality – Digitel; YBOX; MART Foundation; Ann and Ari Resenblatt; The Art Library in Memory of Meir Arison donated by the Ted Arison Family Foundation; Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Arts; Outset Contemporary Art Fund; Emma and Philippe Cohen; Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Tel Aviv; Israel Ministry of Culture and Sports; and The Choreographers’ Association
