Accelerating Toward Apocalypse

“Accelerating toward Apocalypse, Works from the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd.”

Givon Art Forum, Tel Aviv

March-June, 2012

 

The exhibition “Accelerating toward Apocalypse” features a body of works purchased for the Doron Sebbag Art Collection in recent years, alongside earlier works from the collection. It thus explores the evolution, and constancy, of artistic taste over time. Resulting from collaboration with guest curator Tal Yahas, the collection is seen here from a novel perspective that expands its confines.

 

The Exhibition sees an active collection of contemporary art as a corpus developing in the present continuous. As a collector Doron seeks to capture the “contemporary” as it occurs, while pausing from time to time to reflect on what he has achieved. The contemporary collection is thus, by definition, based on an oxymoron: Forever pursuing the zeitgeist in a forward movement, it at the same time suspends its own works in a perpetual “present.” “Accelerating toward Apocalypse” proposes viewing this oxymoron through different manifestations of time captured in the collection’s works.

 

The exhibition spans two floors. The ground level addresses the sense of suspended time, embodied in works that explore the imagined time of archaeology and the temporal multiplicity that is unified in the archive; the bottom floor offers a dizzying temporal experience, manifested in works that explore wasted time, the time of hallucination, and the obsession with capturing the fleeting moment. Another theme presented here is the simultaneity of different points in time, as experienced in the works themselves and by the fact of their subjection to the organizing sequence of an exhibition.