#Iva Kafri

[spaceshuttleproject-blog]

Space Shuttle

Friday - Saturday, September 6th & 7th, 2012. Tel Aviv.

Despite the considerable changes in art practices in recent decades, the studio still remains as the main working space for the majority of contemporary artists. This is the premise of “space shuttle”, a project that invites artists working across the city of Tel-Aviv to treat their studios not just as their work area, but also as a site of display.

Artist Daniel Buren, in an essay titled “The Function of the Studio”, highlighted the problematic inherent in removing a work of art from the studio, where it organically came into being, and transferring it to the exhibition space, where it is unveiled to the public. In this view, the current project aims to provide artists with display options that remain as an integral part of their work process.

Picture yourself a little girl, sitting on a carpet and playing. She holds a rectangular object and flies it around the room as if it were a plane. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott claimed that such is the original creative moment. Notwithstanding its various contemporary incarnations, the studio can still be seen as a “potential space” – the term offered by Winnicott to define the conditions of creativity. The potential space is an intermediate arena that lies between fantasy and reality, between the subjective and objective reality. It is thus the arena where thoughts crystallize into works of art, a place where a concrete space meets an imagined one that artists alone see in their mind’s eye – and that we too may now glimpse into.

Curator: Hila Cohen-Schneiderman

[spaceshuttleproject-blog]

Iva Kafri

Untitled

For Iva Kafri the studio has always been inseparable from the work process. Her installations tend to emphasize the work process by assimilating the exhibition space into a studio, making the former a space of freedom and experimentation. In this project, where the exhibition space is in fact her studio, she seeks rather to extract a minimalism out of freedom and multiplicity.