Event #7: 17 January to 15 February 2020, Hilla Toony Navok, Rolling Rooms
Vernissage: Thursday 16 January, at 18:00
Artist: Hilla Toony Navok
Curated by: Ronny Koren and Maya Bamberger
PROGRAM:
Artist talk and preview in collaboration with Omanut: 14 January, at 19:00 (open to all)
Vernissage: 16 January 2020, at 18:00
Opening hours: Fridays: 15:00-18:00, Saturdays: 12:00-15:00
„Choreographing the Public: Rolling Rooms“ is Hilla Toony Navok’s first solo show in Switzerland. It is the seventh in a series of a dozen of events and exhibitions that focus on creating a language of movement that connects various elements present in the gallery space: the objects, the artist’s presence, the text, the audience and its actions. Navok presents a new body of works, specifically designed to fit the OnCurating project space in Zurich.
Navok’s works begin with associative impressions she gathers as she roams the streets of Tel Aviv, as well as other towns in Israel’s peripheral areas. She peeps into residential spaces and commercial buildings, discovering moments of design that expose the gap between dreams and the longing for style and good taste, and their improvised, incomplete realization. Then she re-organizes those desires and gaps into abstract, strange-looking and timeless sculptural units.
In her work, Navok resonates canonical movements in art history and modern design, and embarks on an examination of Israeli Modernism in the genre’s original habitat. The visual similarity between her work and Concrete art, which took source in Zurich, is apparent to the local viewer. The influence of De Stijl is also recognizable. The colorfulness of iconic objects and the two-dimensionality of the compositions acquire volume and mass when the artist uses plain, Israeli-made utensils and materials to decode the visual reality in which she lives and works. Navok undermines the conventional perception of the materials and aesthetics she deploys, and re-exposes for our benefit qualities and traces of abstract modernism, so deeply embedded in our everyday environment that they had disappeared from view.
Navok’s tenderly presented sculptures and installations are positioned with precision, inviting the viewer to enter a poetic playground. However, their visual naiveté raises questions. Enclosed or not, all of the sculptures contain an opening into a small space, sometimes allowing one viewer to step in. The quasi-intimate encounter with familiar elements brings to the surface complexities regarding consumption, our attitude towards cleanliness and hygiene, and the politics behind the human desire for order and organization.
Hilla Toony Navok
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1974, where she currently lives and works.
Navok graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bezalel Academy in 2009. She had solo exhibitions at various venues, including the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Atelier Shemi, Kibbutz Cabri and KM gallery, Berlin. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in venues such as Neues Museum in Weimar, Ashdod Museum of Art, Bat Yam Museum of Modern Art, Herzliya Museum of Art, and Rockefeller Archaeological Museum, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
She received several awards, including the Beatrice Kolliner Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, Israel Museum (2018), and participated in several residencies including The Fountainhead in Miami, AIR Paradise in Matsudo, Japan, Meet Factory in Prague and Artport residency program in Tel Aviv.