Lively Dead

Liav Mizrahi / Oz Zloof

Curator: Revital Mishali

02.09.21-08.10.21

Pictures by: Maya Zehavi

Lively Dead 

The exhibition Lively Dead is comprised of two solo exhibitions: I Missed a Lot of Opportunities by Oz Zloof and The Snuggle Blanket by Liav Mizrahi. 

In their work, both Zloof and Mizrahi examine how “private” experiences can evolve and be adopted by the collective. Both exhibitions are based upon acts of lending and sharing the emotional and private experiences of the “other”. 

Liav Mizrahi lends his act of private grief over the loss of his mother as the basis for the creation of a public mourning space, and transforms his grief into the shared property of all exhibition visitors. Within the process of lending his private grief, Mizrahi will teach felting workshops in which participants will experiment with processing their own personal grief. The felting technique is an act that is both physical and spiritual at the same time, while also being ritualistic, therapeutic, draining, and yet also comforting. 

The exhibition The Snuggle Blanket is an experiment in gathering time, material and memory. 

The loss of meaning, omission and missing out are topics at the heart of Oz Zloof’s installation and video works. In one of the video works in the exhibition, Zloof transforms a monologue borrowed from a film by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky into a work of art. In the monologue, we hear the voice of Barbara, a French woman about 88 years old, who exposes the horrific truth about life and the lack of meaning in her own life. Zloof has translated the monologue into Hebrew and asked both amateur and professional artists to memorize the monologue and perform it on camera or use it as inspiration for a work of art. 

The video works and objects inspired by the monologue will be presented as a polyphonic mosaic which reinforces the communal ethic guiding Zloof’s work. 

For both artists, human connections play an important role in the artistic act, and the need to share personal experiences with others is an indispensable part of their creative process. In Zloof’s work, the borrowing of Barbara’s voice and its transformation into the basis for the group connection is both an ethical and artistic act connected to theater and drag, which conveys the principle of providing a platform for another person out of an inner commitment towards the act. 

About the artists:

Liav Mizrahi, artist, curator and educator. Holds an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Studied for four years at the Zomer Waldorf School (2021) and guides tours of Egypt. Recipient of the 2021 Pais Israel Lottery grant at the emerging artists’ colony at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. Exhibits and curates in Israel and abroad. 

Oz Zloof, artist, curator and activist in the fields of education, community and cultural policy. A founding member of the “Tarbut Movement”, curator at the Afula Municipal Gallery of Art, curator in the Haifa Museums emerging artists’ colony, and artistic director of the “Tarbut School” open art school and residency program. 

Exhibition Season: Present Continuous

Lively Dead is the third 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.