"In the cinema we screened the 400 lashes" -
The memory in the eyes of the artist Josiane and Nono - in a solo exhibition in Tel Aviv
Exhibition Curator: Nir Harmat Nir Harmat
Opening, Thursday 6.5.2021: 18: 00-22: 00

Instead of art
6 Shevil Hameretz St., Tel Aviv

Oren / Leah Goldberg

Here I will not hear the sound of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will not wear a snow bonnet,
But in the shade of these pines
All my childhood resurrected.

The ringing of the needles: there was - -
I will call homeland to the snow space,
To greenish ice binds the creek,
To the language of the song in a foreign land.

Maybe only travel birds know -
When they hang between earth and sky -
This is the pain of both homelands.

I have been planted with you twice,
I grew with you, pines,
And my roots in two different landscapes.

The body of Josiane and Nono's works is interspersed with fragmented memories, understood by oblivion and stained with shards of fantasy. It uses a kind of "prosthetic memory" (memory prosthetic) to describe the process by which builds renewed create memories of past experiences that mimic real alternative reality.
She follows in the footsteps of French director Fran?ois Truffaut (in his film 'Four Hundred Lashes', 1959), scattering milestones in search of the "authentic" in relation to her personal past through their collective past or their joint cinematic representation. It raises questions about the perception of reality and the construction of memory and its / our need to cling to "truth" or rephrase it. Through them she deals with journey, migration from "there to here", belonging, language and appropriation.
The frozen freeze frame in the last image of the film served as a spark which activated and started the body of work shown in this exhibition. And Nono records the portrait of Antoine standing on the seashore when his future is unknown, dozens of times, over and over again. Throughout the last scene he runs while precisely his frozen stop marks for Vanunu the beginning of her work. She recognized in the scene biographical elements of herself until "I could not separate the two. Reality and illusion mixed and became a living memory - fake, fabricated, but with elements that really happened." One of the effects of historical representations in the various arts is the approximation of the viewer to the past, the viewer is used until the reconstruction of history. Art relies on the viewers' identification with the events represented to create for them memories that are not based on first-hand experiences, yet these are plastic memories - real in material with great emotional power.
The sequence of Venono's works, forms the connection between the signifier and the signified, and uses these types of disintegration and disruption in order to undermine the single narrative (single story ). It uses various representational practices that disrupt authentic memory and sabotage the continuous and linear course of the narrative. She says: "My work does not fall under a category that sets boundaries. I seek to dissolve the boundary between reality and fiction, I do not want to delineate. I do not operate from or into a category."
By borrowing images that undergo a process of abstraction from Truffaut's film, Nono performs a kind of ?inventory count? of the present and tells her own story in an abstract way. It uses the framework and structure of the cinematic work and through them holds a discussion about the myth of childhood and lost time. Vanunu was born in France and immigrated to Israel on a journey to form an identity. The French language and culture are an essential part of her personality and she finds herself a stranger here and there: "an existential state of floating identity that she has learned to come to terms with" (Anat Gatnio in the text of the exhibition "De Ja Vu" 2009). Memory and inspiration are the driving force of this body of work and they enable the deconstruction of the past. When she visited the courtyard of the school where she studied in Lyon (France), the courtyard in her mind's eye and memories was spacious and impressive, became in contemporary eyes the small and aura that she has attributed to her all the years since. The gap between childhood memory and reality as she experiences it today has become a kind of renewed and different look, anonymous but familiar.
The exhibition consists of multi-medium expressions that surround the subject in painting, video, objects and ready-made objects.
All of these create an enigmatic space in which we observe history, memory, daydream of someone else. And Nono from the trilogy at a glance, disrupts the narrative, weaves reality and fiction together into an inventory that makes it difficult for the enigma to decipher.
"From an early age, I adapted to the ability to escape from reality to find refuge in fiction, and it soon became an intimate space in which I built a different, boundless world. Over the years, it became a kind of mindset. Over the years it became material for creation.
Photography is an integral part of my work in recent years. Family photography has been at the center of the works of recent years. It is a type of photography that stimulates memory.
Anything can be a source of inspiration. The source of inspiration has the role of creating an idea that develops an existing situation in the studio.
Traces of the past are hidden in the family album, in recent years I have been building videos that involve family photography and cinema.
My works are similar to me, they are monochromatic: black or white. The techniques I use vary. I develop technique while creating.
Cinema serves as a material for me within the work. I really enjoy involving film actors and movie clips as crossing the line between fiction and reality.
Fulfillment is a word that for me gets a new face every time. In the formative moments there is a sense of fulfillment, but very quickly the next piece brings me back to the point where everything starts all over again. "
The artist's website:
https://www.josyanev.com /
The artist on Facebook: Josyane Vanounou
Closing: 29.5.2021
Gallery hours:
Monday-Thursday 11: 00-18: 00
Friday-Saturday 10: 00-14: 00

שביל המרץ 6 תל אביב