Exposure: Recent Acquisitions

“Exposure: Recent Acquisitions, the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd.”

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv

8 November 2000 – 3 February, 2001

 

The exhibitionExposure: Recent Acquisitions, the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd.”, held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2000 through 2001, was comprised mainly of photography, video and art objects, reflecting the direct, penetrating visual language of images employed in the electronic media and attesting to the “zeitgeist” at the beginning of the new millennium. Such images are familiar to us from the daily press and the glossy pages of magazines; they flicker in endless cycles on our television screens.

 

The ongoing exposure to events as they happen, broadcast in real time from any spot on the globe, blunts our senses, turning exposure, confession and voyeurism into routine occurrences. The internet facilitates personal and revealing contact, yet at the same time symbolizes anonymous, unreal connections. Whereas in the art field, the artist’s uncompromising exposure of his personal- biographical story diminishes the gap between art and the life materials that nourish it, sometimes lending that exposure an overtly therapeutic dimension.

 

The works present a critical and multifaceted reading of the human condition in our time, through thematic groupings such as the youth culture, the culture of consumerism, the world of fashion, questions of gender and personal identity. Many works grant expression to a new kind of ritual; the work itself is a documentation of a rite in which the artist-director-producer officiates, alongside models, actors and extras. The human body – stripped bare or clothed, attractive or repulsive, staged or registered at random by the cruising photographer’s lens – is transformed into a signifier, a carrier of meaning.