Reality Check

Tal Gaash / Netta Gaash / Tali Milstein

Curator: Talya Raz

23.03.23-28.4.23

Reality Check 

In the exhibition Reality Check, Tal Gaash, Netta Gaash and Tali Milstein address the personal space they created for themselves following pain, injury and trauma. In various artistic processes and mediums – such as installation, video, sound, drawing and painting – the artists deal with concentrated areas of pain. Each in their own way, they define, sort and siphon their pain outwards. The exhibition addresses the gap between the artists’ personal life experiences, and how these are perceived by their surroundings, as well as the question: “Who decides what reality is, when reality is such a subjective experience?” 

"Reality check” is something that clarifies or serves as a reminder of reality often by correcting a misconception. In the world of psychiatry, the concept “reality testing” describes the certainty that what we see is in fact occurring in reality, and the ability to distinguish between the internal and external worlds. The artists participating in this exhibition have experienced extreme mental and physical experiences, either themselves or indirectly through someone close to them. These experiences undermined their perception of reality and the boundary between internal and external experiences.

The works in the exhibition are the outcome of a mental search for autonomous, safe spaces in the world. This search may have been conducted inside the home, in self-imposed isolation, through rituals that include self-injury -  a way of converting mental pain into physical pain and creating a certain dissociation from the world - or through the worlds of musical, textual or plastic arts, as spaces for transforming pain into an emotion that can be expressed or accepted. 

In her works, Tal Gaash processes her grief for her brother who struggled with schizophrenia and passed away in his home due to medical complications, as well as the guilt and sense of loss over what was not possible for him during his life. The brother, who was a gifted musician, left many instruments in his inheritance, including a grand piano and an archive comprised of hundreds of notebooks he obsessively filled with thoughts, ideas and musical writing. The decomposed grand piano, the notebooks and a number of video works are placed together in the installation “Inheritance”. One of these video works is “I Am a Good Artist”, which documents the artist and her father entering the archive and examining the brother’s writings. 

In the video work “Everyone Will Live Forever”, Netta Gaash, a student in the Department of Screen-Based Arts at Bezalel and Tal Gaash’s daughter, processes the familial grief over her uncle Gal. Gal documented his last years, out of a belief that his life and work were one. In her film, Gaash incorporates video clips from Gal’s archive, video shots of familial situations and interviews she conducted with his parents, who try to see the parallel reality in which he lived, shut up in his home for years, in a different light. The film also documents the opening of the grave of Tal and Gal’s little sister, Maayan, who drowned at age nine. It depicts the perspective of Gal, who was very attached to his little sister. The film’s soundtrack, which Netta created, incorporates music Gal composed, taken from midi recordings he left behind. 

Tali Milstein presents large-scale self-portrait drawings and paintings. Milstein touches on complex and painful issues of identity, self-injury, bulimia and femininity. In the series of self-portraits, she describes herself in a raw and vulnerable state and exposes the inner tumult that comes with these struggles. In her virtuosic paintings, replete with detail, she pulls and tempts the viewer inwards. This, despite their grating and disturbing presence – for they depict self-destructive behaviors including self-injury rituals such as cutting and bulimia, which leave both the artist and the viewers drained physically and emotionally. 

Exhibition Events

Gallery talk

Saturday, April 22, 12:00

With the participating artists and  the curator Talya Raz

Resuscitation

Music and performance event

Saturday April 15  between 11:30-13:30

Participating: Hadas Gur (vocals and performance), Udi Brener (Viola) and Einav Har Anan Cohen (Piano and percussion)

Musical performative event in several rounds, where the musicians will Resuscitate the grand piano and texts by Gal Izdarechet z”l, composing Tal Gaash’s installation

Free entrance, each round lasts 10 minutes

During Pesach the gallery will be closed:

Pesach: 5-6 April
Pesach 2: 12 April
Independence day: 26 April

Exhibition Season: Flooded

The exhibition Reality Check is the ninth and last 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 series of exhibitions “Flooded”, Alfred Gallery seeks 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. The artists selected to exhibit during this year have proposed exhibitions and events that consider different aspects of the exhibition season's title.