Artist: Gili Avissar
Exhibition title: Schwarze Zunge/ Black Tongue
Curated by: Axel Lapp
Venue: MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany
Date: June 16 – October 14, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MEWO Kunsthalle
The colorful fabrics in Gili Avissar’s works are sewn into extensive installations. They hang from scaffolding and divide the space like walls. Other shapes emerge from the objects, they are filled, connected or weighted down with ropes and strings in the room. The patterns and textures of the different fabrics come together in the installations to form shimmering collages.
Gili Avissar works continuously on and with these objects. He constantly changes and integrates them into a new context. One can almost refer to this way of work as organic. He repeatedly modifies old works, dividing them up or sewing them into a different context altogether. Every space requires him to create new works. The works are abstract. Only occasionally can the viewer speculate to have seen concrete representations. The fabric-stitched images of eyes form the center of two works. They look out of the objects as if a gigantic creature is behind it. The fabric sculptures become the costumes of uncanny figures. The objects have their own life.
Costumes constitute an important part of Gili Avissar’s work. In addition to being part of extensive works, his costumes are created also for people, who wear them in performances in the exhibition rooms. The desire to disguise and to change is omnipresent. Gili Avissar has often worked with theater and dance productions and designed costumes and spatial productions. His large installations seem to dress up the space, they disguise it as a place of aesthetic creativity, and turn it into a stage.
The opening of the exhibition on June 15th, 2018 will feature a performance by Gili Avissar and Stephanie Müller (rag*treasure).
Gili Avissar (*1980 in Haifa) studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, the Glasgow School of Art and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. He participated in numerous scholarship programs that have brought him to places such as Dusseldorf, Leipzig, Paris and Prague. He lives in Tel Aviv.
As part of the preparations of this exhibition, he spent two months in Memmingen.
