Bigger Than the Door frame

Nadia Adina Rose / Meital Covo

14.10.21-13.11.21

Pictures by: Yuval Chai

Bigger Than the Door frame 

In the duo exhibition Bigger Than the Doorframe, artists Meital Covo and Nadia Adina Rose present sound, sculpture and installation works which were formed, in part, through cooperation. Through Rose’s large fabric sculptures and the talking voices recorded and edited by Covo, the artists examine the concept of language as homeland and architectural space as body. 

In the spring of 2021, Covo invited Rose to record a soliloquy, a monologue in which the speaker talks to herself, verbalizing thoughts intended for herself only. The voices of Rose’s thoughts serve as the raw material for the multi-channel sound installation "Gam Gam ve Gam" in which Covo plays within the physical, architectural and cultural space which is created between the internal dialogue and the sampled sound, between stuttering and eloquence. Rose’s voice emits from nine speakers of differing dimensions placed on the edges of the exhibition space. They create a random vocal composition of changing narratives. Rose is a poet and yet she has difficulty speaking. During her childhood and youth, she stuttered and even spent several years in silence. 

Rose sculpts from soft materials, fabrics the body encounters when preparing for sleep: wool blankets, pillows and cotton sheets. The artist’s blankets carry emotional baggage, as these are wool blankets her parents brought with them when the family immigrated from Russia in 1991. For Rose, the blankets function as transitional objects between ‘there’ and ‘here’. Within her working process the objects undergo a transformation from the world of wakefulness (daily use) and beyond into the dream world (artistic expression). 

The placement of works in the exhibition makes reference to the ‘Baroque House Scheme’ of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which he draws a parallel between the architectural building and the human body, between the life teeming within the building and the emotional life housed within the body. In reference to this scheme, Covo’s sound works are placed within the Gallery’s inner room, in a space which is small, dark and windowless, while Rose’s large-scale works are placed in the gallery’s anterior, illuminated space, which has a large glass façade facing the street.    

About the artists:

Meital Covo is a sound artist who connects between voice, installation, text, video, object and photography. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Covo is the recipient of an America-Israel Cultural Foundation grant. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions and screenings in Israel and abroad, inter alia at the British Film Institute’s cinema in London, the Serpentine Pavilion in London, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon and Zumu Museum on the Move. 

Nadia Adina Rose is an artist, poet, illustrator and lecturer on art. She creates in the media: painting, sculpture and installation. She is a graduate of the College of Arts in Moscow, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and holds a master’s degree from the Faculty of Arts – Hamidrasha at Beit Berl. Rose is the recipient of the 2019 Shoshana Ish Shalom Award for artistic work. She has exhibited in solo and group shows, inter alia at the Janco Dada Museum, the Israel Museum, the Eretz Israel Museum and the RSUH Museum in Moscow. Her first book of poetry, “Snow Ink” (Helicon –Afik Publishing), was included in the National Library of Israel’s list of ten most recommended books, and won the 2016 Minister of Culture award. The manuscript of her second book,“In the Belly of the Wolf” (Afik Publishing), was awarded the 2020 Acum prize for poetry.

Exhibition Season: Present Continuous

Bigger Than the Door frame is the forth exhibition of the 2021 exhibition season, dedicated to the theme: Present Continuous. This year’s exhibition season will focus on our sense of reality, which was upended in the beginning of 2020, when competing forces of slowdown and momentum began acting simultaneously, distorting our sense of space and time. Since we were rendered incapable of comprehending the present or planning the future, we were compelled to exercise resilience, to develop coping mechanisms and to break free from old habits and paradigms – to learn to move continuously in the present continuous tense.

 The members of the Alfred Cooperative have invited artists to propose exhibitions which address the theme “Present Continuous”, either through artistic interpretation or through physical acts that echo into the future. The objective is to present artistic endeavours centered around uncertainty as a guiding principle - ideas that make use of rules and internal logic which impact on the progression and meaning of the exhibition; exhibitions that address issues of uncertainty with respect to the exhibition space or the timeframe of the exhibition and encourage live events held simultaneously in both the physical space of the gallery and the virtual space.