Writer and curator, Noah Simblist, invites performance artist, Tamy Ben-Tor, to testsite. Exhibiting will be a video-performance, Time and Space, which features a monolog delivered by a fictional artist that describes her work, her process and her career. In conjunction with the exhibition, Ben-Tor will also be performing AVNER at the testsite space.

From the artist regarding Time and Space:

“I made this video as an urgent comment on contemporary art practice, specifically the so-called non-for profit art that fills cultural institutions and is funded by grants. Artists have become grey clerks who have no particular passion or obsession, nor interest of any kind for that matter. Rather, they engage in impotent so-called “research” which sounds better in grant applications than in the work itself.

There is an overflow of people who have studied and memorized this academic jargon and make a career for themselves based on it. It replaces the function of art as a source of consolement and catharsis and turns it into an exclusively elitist academic exchange, which has no need for an audience."

From the artist regarding AVNER:

“In my work in performance art over the last 12 years, I have attempted to deepen an investigation into the human presence in an artificial environment, which is the work of art. I find performance to be an exciting medium because of its transparency and closeness to the human condition, our dwelling in our bodies for our life’s duration and the decisions we make on the shape and meaning of that life are, for me, an exact metaphor for the performative work.

With all of technology’s developments and so-called advancements, man still dwells in his body and has to struggle with time, the duration of his life. The performative act is a desperate act. Perhaps it’s even a pathetic one, in which the performer lets his body and his self be pulled out of his natural surroundings and examined. I think that the role of performance, if one can speak so didactically about an art form, is to strip a person (both performer and viewer) of their cultural social affiliation and deepen their contemplation upon their existence as thinking feeling beings.”

This project was made possible with generous support from Artis. Artis is an independent nonprofit that supports and promotes contemporary artists from Israel internationally.