Outset Israel supported two works at ECHO: Voice Museum Action, a three-day live-performance event which took place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in December 2014. The site-specific events shed a unique light on the galleries of the museum and brought together the human voice and the Museum's various spaces. Viewers were invited to move in a procession between three locations in the Herta and Paul Amir Building: the light fall, the Dina and Raphael Recanati Family Foundation Galleries, housing the Israeli art collections, and the Art library in the memory of Meir Arison.
The participating artists manifested their voice in a range of contexts – artistic, cultural and socio-political. The live performances related to the spaces in innovative ways, in terms of vocal expression, the spoken word, the spatial dimension and the movement it enables, as well as the art on display. The museum's architecture was deconstructed and qualified its place's symbolic functions as a centre cultural space are explored.
Outset supported The Replacement by Josef Sprinzak and Eleison by Guy Gutman. Vocal and performance artist Josef Sprinzak (b. 1962, Israel, lives and works in Tel Aviv) acts as an artist-curator performing 'a counter-curational vocal action'. In The Replacment he invited four performers to collaborate in developing vocal and textual works in the museum space.
The artists employ a range of artistic expressions – from performance art and spoken word to theater and music, and tackle the museums role in generating artistic value through vocal intervention. They respond to the works of early Israeli art on view as milestones in Zionist history, and their own conscious and physical presence in Tel Aviv. In the course of the performance, original masterpieces were removed from the walls, making way for a new upcoming display of art from the collection.
Director, playwright and artist Guy Gutman (b. 1971, Israel, lives and works in Tel Aviv) presented a series of performances involving text and movement, stretching a vocal-geographical line between two libraries located in two very different parts of the city: the Garden Library at the Lewinsky Park, which serves the migrant communities of South Tel Aviv, and the Art Library at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Performed in the hushed and orderly atmosphere of the latter, shielded from outside disturbances, the temporary ensemble examines the presence and absence of voice and body, of knowledge and accumulation, and creates a constellation of voices and silences. The project employs the museal context to render audible those voices normally absent - culturally or in the social-politically – from Tel Aviv landscape.
