Yonatan Vinistsky's The Cosmos installation spread over the Pavilion’s three floors, offering a model of an exhibition. Its 16 elements were designed at a 1:1 ratio but their very existence as concept and matter was a model. The title was taken from a book by Avigdor Hameiri (published in 1955), which was the first attempt in Hebrew to communicate astronomy to adolescents.
Physical and philosophical questions about the nature of the universe as a "site" populated by all forms, objects and events, were manifested as an installation that challenges the concept of exhibition. The viewers wandered through a 15-minute cyclical set in which all audio-visual elements were simultaneously activated, and the exhibition’s "tale" was rolled out as a reciprocal system diverging between the exhibits and the viewers’ and artist’s view.
Vinitsky’s work referred to all the roles that fulfil the field of art and are realised in an "exhibition." In addition to the artistic object, it comprised the gallery design, curatorship, the texts and the various mediation and advertising means. Material culture is exposed in his work as historical consciousness and an autobiographical journey resting upon the shoulders of existing models: images, objects, writing styles and work Technicalities. The sensitivity to a life of action and craft was heightened in the exhibition to an awareness that a work of art, by its very belonging to the field of action, even if conceived as an individual’s consciousness, is always a tapestry of many—a universe.
This project was supported by Beauchamp Estates.
