Houses in Tel Aviv
Craft and Leisure, City Museum Tel-aviv Yafo (2024)
Curators: Galit Gaon and Hadassa Cohen
oil and laser-cut on plywood, 110X160 cm
This work is a tribute to the painting “Houses in Tel Aviv” (1923) by the artist Reuven Rubin, which was created exactly one hundred years before the opening of the exhibition “Craft and Leisure” in the new City Museum Tel Aviv-Yafo. The painting shows the sand hills landscape of Tel Aviv as it was at the beginning of the 20th century: the view fills the entire surface of the painting and the sea stretches out like a horizon line, almost merging with the Mediterranean sky.
Thinking about Tel Aviv today, a city that has become one of the most expensive in the world, Robin’s pastoral and naive houses change their faces. In this work, they are replaced by the pixelated house symbol that appears in the unemployment signing process, as part of the identification and sorting system of “Bituach Leumi” (Israel’s social security). After scanning the finger at the entrance to the complex, two options appear in front of the visitor: a summons for a meeting - the clerk icon, or a referral home - the home icon. A digital and bureaucratic dimension is added to the local vision, in which the city of Tel Aviv is represented by a frontal encounter between a pastoral landscape and a complex economic reality.
Oil painting: Irad Lavi
Lasercut: papercut factory
Framing: Tsochar Ben Yehuda
