Habitats

Tamar Tessler

Curator: Dr. Revital Michali

18.11.21-27.11.21

Habitats

During the first coronavirus lockdowns, when people began feverishly straightening up their homes in order to make room for themselves, domestic fences and city benches filled up with stuff people were giving away, including tons of books. 

Along with the act of emptying her own house, Tamar Tessler began collecting the old books she found in the streets. For her, these served as an anchor in stormy seas, like cities of refuge. Over time, the labor of collecting books spread from the public to the personal sphere: It was transformed into a journey of encounters with those who offer their old books for the taking, people with abandoned apartments housing unclaimed contents, with dedications inscribed in old ink and random notes forgotten among the pages, illustrating the personas of their original owners. 

In the exhibition Habitats, to be presented in the Alfred Institute’s public exhibition space, handmade analog collages will be displayed, comprised of a multitude of images cut out of encyclopedias and nonfiction books from the nineteen sixties and seventies. Botanical illustrations, drawings of animals and archaeological photographs connect together and create new worlds. Habitats float in space, producing an alternative to the chaotic reality. The borders between the cuttings, which are visible to the eye, examine the boundaries between nature and the urban landscape, as well as the interactions between growth, withering and time. 

At a time when digital communication has become the default, the artist chooses to revert to the labor of manual creation. Tessler abandons the computer and adopts scissors, glue and printed books. She takes images apart, isolates them from the multitude of baggage and meaning associated with them, and transforms them into decorative elements, shapes and colors, whose significance is created by the very act of connecting them together anew. The act of recycling, working with paper that shows the signs of time and bears the colors of memory and the inaccuracies of old printing, enables Tessler to tell a story, to embark on a journey – to wander between past, present and future, to create islands that float in time, new growing environments, distilled and harmonious. 

Tamar Tessler (b. 1978)

Illustrator and Graphic Designer, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Graduate of the Ascola School of Design, Tel Aviv (class of 2001) and the Screenwriting dept. at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School, Jerusalem (class of 2003). 

Since 2001, Tessler runs an independent design studio. She works primarily with cultural institutions, artists and independent designers. She is the author and illustrator of the book “Abukacha’s Shoes”, which was published by Canadian publisher Groundwood Books. 

Curator Dr. Revital Michali

Researcher and independent art curator, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Michali holds a doctorate in Visual Art from Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on women’s art, performance and gender. 

Michali has curated and produced exhibitions and art events in Tel Aviv, Berlin and the United States, including solo and group exhibitions at the ID Festival and Bethanien Künstlerhaus in Berlin, Providence College Galleries in Providence and performance night events at the galleries: Circle 1 in Berlin and Kav 16 and Alfred in Tel Aviv. She has written and produced artist books and collectors’ catalogs and last year she became a member of Alfred Cooperative Institute for Art and Culture.

Exhibition Season: Present Continuous

Habitats is the fifth 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.