Matching Expectations
Efrat Mazor & Efrat Rubin
Curator: Dr. Revital Michali
8.12.22-7.1.23
Matching Expectations
Efrat Mazor, photographer and former dancer, and Efrat Rubin, multidisciplinary artist, choreographer and dancer, join together for an in-depth exploration of the physical and emotional baggage manifested in the bedroom. Mazor and Rubin seek to expose the bedroom’s superfluous dimension, as well as its inherent healing potential. Mazor and Rubin have invited three dancers to reveal their intimate connection to the bedroom. Through discussion, observation, movement and photographs with the dancers, they give visual and motorial expression to the way the human/female body embeds its sensations and feelings in the surface on which it sleeps and acts.
The bed is the preliminary image from which Mazor and Rubin draw their inspiration for the exhibition. This could be an individual’s own bed, a hotel-room bed or a bed used in a rehearsal room or film set. Unlike the bed traditionally found in paintings by the great masters, where a woman is usually present, there is no clear female presence in the work of Mazor and Rubin. As in Tracey Emin’s My Bed or the iconic hotel room photograph in Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain, only traces of what occurred on the bed remain. The bed is a space that bears fantasies, relationships, passion, disappointment, anxiety and exhaustion. The bed takes on everything that has happened in it: thoughts, insomnia, storms of emotion, crises and dreams.
The exhibition Matching Expectations is comprised of three elements: installation, video and dance performance. The collaborative installation in the gallery’s central space includes Mazor’s photographs on the walls and Rubin’s dynamic painted wood boards on the floor. Beside the installation, Rubin’s video Winds is screened in the small room, and the sound emitting from it (by Yehu Yaron) spills over into the gallery space, linking the sounds of the diegetic world to the sounds of the world outside the film. Dance performances during the exhibition will take place in the main gallery space and the dancers will make use of the painted objects.
In the exhibition Matching Expectations, Mazor and Rubin are interested in bringing the audience closer to the creative process so they can take an active part in it. The audience is invited to touch the raw materials of the photographs, to change the location of the painted fragments, and to watch the installation come alive in AR (augmented reality) by scanning a barcode for a Facebook or Instagram filter (link for demonstration: https://youtu.be/qRCxpw2LDv4).
The video Winds, projected in a loop in the small room, is comprised of stills photos brought to life. A woman sleeps, her body sinks into the folds of the fabric. She disappears within it and looks at the wrinkles with a shaking hand. She has trouble breathing. Three women emerge as an apparition, moving like ghosts, sharing her thoughts and piling their hands on her breathing stomach, easing her loneliness. She imagines an alternative, fantasy world for herself, of fragmented, mechanized movement, like an unending internal dialogue. The film’s soundtrack is composed of recordings of winds. The wind’s presence generates a feeling of disconnection from reality and a sense of dreaming. The contrabass sounds that rise from the void depict a uterine memory, a memory of birth and ancient movement of life. Low bass murmurs can be heard in the folds of fabric which have been brought to life, expressing discomfort and restlessness within the contiguous sense of time.
Duration of video: 10 minutes
Direction, animation and editing: Efrat Rubin
Photography: Efrat Mazor
Music: Yehu Yaron
Participants: Einat Ganz, Dana Zecharia and Noa Siloh
About the artists
Efrat Mazor, dance photographer. Mazor researches bodily movement with her camera. She is a dancer, teacher and former rehearsal director of the Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. She practices yoga. Mazor holds a B.ed degree in education and a dance teacher’s certificate from the Kibbutzim College. As a dancer, she received a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and Japan’s Ministry of Culture to study traditional Japanese dance arts (Butoh) in Tokyo. She currently works as a stills and video photographer for various independent projects in the fields of dance and theater, plastic art and music.
Her photographs address the fine line between documentary and art: https://efratmazor.wixsite.com/photographyportfolio
Efrat Rubin, multidisciplinary artist. Rubin is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design’s Visual Communications Department (B.Des degree). She danced and trained as a choreographer at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, part of the Belgian Rosas Theater Company. She is a member of the Alfred Cooperative Institute for Art & Culture since 2020. During the past nineteen years, she has worked as an independent choreographer, dancer and interdisciplinary artist. Her works have been exhibited in a wide range of festivals and exhibitions in Israel and abroad. Since 2015, she has served as the creator and artistic director of interdisciplinary festivals and projects that integrate dance, animation, music, video and performance, including: Body Joints 2017, Resite 2015, In Between 2020, and Poalot at Alfred 2022, in collaboration with Revital Michali. She is the recipient of the 2014 Culture Department Choreography Prize, for her works that combine dance and animation. Her works are characterized by various combinations between diverse disciplines from dance, animation, painting and video. www.efratrubin.com
Dr. Revital Mishali, researcher, independent art curator, teacher and performance artist, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Mishali holds a doctorate in Visual Art from Tel Aviv University. Her writing and art deal with female and maternal identity and its connection to the public space. Mishali 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 Alfred Gallery. She has also curated performance night events and festivals 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.
Exhibition Events:
Views – Dance performance by Efrat Rubin
Participating dancers and collaborators:
Einat Ganz, Dana Zecharia and Noa Siloh
Music: Yehu Yaron
The dance performance Views is the product of research from the world of animation and painting. It depicts the deconstruction and construction of movement, the “pixelization” of the body. Through the body and its murmurs as well as the use of sound, the dancers paint virtual landscapes in space and depict a journey deep inside wild landscapes, in an overloaded time, and a collective narrative comprised of personal stories and reflecting movement inwards and outwards of emotion and being. Duration of performance: 45 minutes (including the video Winds: 10 minutes)
Exhibition Season: Flooded
The exhibition Matching Expectations is the sixth of the 2022-2023 exhibition season, dedicated to the theme: Flooded.
We live in an era that is flooded and flooding. The world is overflowing like a river. While we must flow with the current, we actually have trouble keeping our heads above water, especially with FOMO hovering above us. Boundaries melt in the spheres of the psychological / consciousness and the physical / corporeal / geographical. There are too many possibilities and choosing between them is confusing.
Through the exhibition series “Flooded”, Alfred Gallery strives to anchor islands in the unending flow of events, images, talks and words. Although the flooding is uncontrollable, it is not passive. It is a conflict arena, an upheaval that threatens to spill over, it is movement, struggle and conciliation. We have asked artists for proposals and ideas for exhibitions and events that flood or are flooded, and consider different aspects of this exhibition season’s title.