In 2014 Outset Israel supported 'Change' by Michal Helfman, a large-scale, site-specific installation that included sculpture, painting, drawing, and video. Commissioned specifically for the CCA (Center for Contemporary Art) in Tel Aviv, Change was Helfman's largest project to date, a complex gesamtkunstwerk that focused on sweeping themes such as migration, generational repetition, and disillusionment.
After passing through an ornate vestibule, visitors came to a pyramid taken from the American one-dollar bill. Its call for change, which could be thought of in a revolutionary context, here became a signifier of currency exchange, and also alluded to plain loose coins. It opened to reveal a smuggler’s hideout, a niche carved into the economic landscape, literally inhabiting its symbols.
On another floor, seductive reflective surfaces were violently interrupted by fossils that have metaphorically been hurled through millions of years and that serve as evidence of eternity. This space also acted as a performative arena: Once in a while, a performer cleaned the surfaces, keeping the system functioning and shiny, lubricating its joints. Scented candles scattered throughout the space culminated in works that featured fire as a symbol of metamorphosis, a bridge from dream to reality. Two narratives were contrasted in which fire is the motif that ties dream to reality, and in which a son tries to warn a father of impending doom. Nearby, reminiscent of the hurled fossils, a little girl’s schoolbag appeared to have shattered the metal grating.
The child-parent relationship was explored through literature, psychology, and popular culture and carried with it motifs of escapist lifestyles, entertainment, and danger.
Change began and ended with a convoy. The pyramid’s backdrop was a scanned image of the Sinai Desert being crossed by a group of people. In the cyclically structured video upstairs, they came to life; their collective journey punctuated by individual gestures that were at once unique and common. Like them, visitors to Change migrated through the installation as agents in the ebb and flow of empires, whose trails do not change, even if those who walk them change with each generation.
ON VIEW: 28th November 2013 - 1st February 2014
Michal Helfman is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1973 and based in Tel Aviv. She holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where she currently teaches. Helfman has had solo-shows in the Israel Museum (2007), and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2009). She has exhibited in numerous international exhibitions including the 50th Venice Biennial, as well as solo shows in San Francisco’s Institute of Visual Art and Cardi Gallery, Milan. She was awarded the Wolf Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer Award and was a 2008 runner-up for the Gottesdiener Award.
