Sunflowers
Duo exhibition with Karen Dolev (2024)
Parterre Projects, Tel Aviv
Curator: Roy Brand
"Sunflowers" is a duo exhibition featuring a selection of drawings, sculptures, and a video work created during the first half of 2024; in the midst of an ongoing disaster, on the brink of an abyss. Karen Dolev and Uri Weinstein, a couple who live together and share a studio, present works that evoke a nostalgic longing for an unfulfilled promise about the future. This longing carries a sense of disappointment, but also embraces the beauty and pleasure inherent in longing itself. Dolev's works are imbued with a nostalgic haze and youthful innocence, while Weinstein dramatizes scenes from popular culture, focusing on moments of magic and embarrassment, with theatrical tension—frozen in time.
The exhibition takes its thematic cue from the sunflower, named for its unique heliotropic ability to track the sun’s trajectory across the sky. The works included in the exhibition capture moments in time and explore the passage of time itself. In Hebrew etymology, the term "Hamaniya" (sunflower) incorporates "Nehiya" (longing), suggesting a journey toward the sun, imbued with cyclic passion that fades and returns each day. The yellow, burnt, tanned flowers, adorned with their distinctive animal-like seed teeth, yearn for the sun every day anew. This longing metaphorically parallels the enduring struggle of Sisyphus, persistently rolling his boulder upward to the top of the mountain. Yet, the sun is different every day; and one might even envision Sisyphus as happy.
Text by Roy Brand
Installation views by Daniel Hanoch
Video loop, 1:30 min
The video work “Aharon” presents a close-up of a dachshund dog face. His expressive eyes alternately blink and widen, moving between tiredness, curiosity and sadness. The work is displayed on a four-legged television, next to which rests a bowl made of stainless steel in which the drinking water has been replaced by wax casting.
︎︎︎ Video documentation
Oil on C-print, 38x55 cm
The work The Thing in the Dark is a digitally processed image, based on a character from the television series ‘Following the Magical Stories’ starring Itai Segev (2000). In this episode, broadcast every year on Israel’s National Remembrance Day, Segev plays The Thing in the Dark, an imaginary character who visits children’s bedrooms and helps them deal with complex emotional situations.This episode tells the story of Asaf, a young boy dealing with the death of his father in the war.
He Walked Through the Fields, (2022)
Papier-mâché, knitted kippah, button-up shirt
"He Walked Through the Fields" a head sculpture, made of yellowish-brown papier-mâché, is placed on top of a loudspeaker with a glass front. The paper is taken from the book "He Walked Through the Fields" by Moshe Shamir (in the first edition), whose hero is Uri Kahana, a patriotic soldier who sacrifices his life for the homeland.
Flowers From Flowers for the Holiday (2024)
In 2021 I presented a space-based audio installation called Flowers for the Holiday in an abandoned furniture store at 48 Shalma St., Tel Aviv. As part of the installation, I have used the electrical cables sticking out of the bare walls, and turned them into sculpted flowers. When the exhibition ended, I "trimmed" these flowers thinking of another incarnation of them, as part of a new work. In this work, I used those flowers, gathered them into a wreath and placed them inside a ceramic vase created by my mother especially for this exhibition.
Papier-mâché and pigment