Brighter Than Thousand Suns | A solo show by Yeudit Shlosberg-Yogev
Curators: Sala-manca
Mamuta Center for Contemporary Art at the Hansen House
15.3.18 – 11.5.18
Opening: 15.3.18 20:00
Opening hours: Mon. and Tuesd: 12:00-16:00, Wed. 14:00-18:00, Friday: 10:00-14:00
In 1978, atomic scientist Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski shoved his head into a particle accelerator to fix a malfunction. A photon beam that was shooting around in the accelerator hit his head at the speed close to the speed of light. The scientist claimed he did not feel pain, but saw a light that was “brighter than a thousand suns.”
Yehudit Shlosberg-Yogev’s first solo exhibition, titled “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” (after the book of that title on the Manhattan Project) contains apocalyptic and poetic images that are fascinating and disturbing at the same time. Like Bugorski, for Shlosberg-Yogev, too—who created these works as part of her tenure as Artist in Residence at the Mamuta Art Center, the atomic bomb is the driving force.
The exhibition is an invitation to experience the basement space of Mamuta at Hansen House as a sanctuary for visual remains moments after the great disaster—images that appear to be taken from an archeological journey through the realms of human terror—from dread of the magnitude of human power to fear of no return.
In one of the works—A Small Step for a Man—an artificial moon appears in the desert, next to a single man fighting the wind. Is this how Shlosberg-Yogev envisions the dream of the last survivor? And what lies in the man’s futile action? Is it beauty, pathos and solitude—or humor and hope, as well?
In another work—The Journey of the Dead—Shlosberg-Yogev created a documentary film shot from the locomotive of a freight train through in the Desert of Zin in southern Israel. The train is traveling from nowhere to nowhere, passing by the Israeli nuclear reactor that we are not supposed to know that we know is there. The train’s journey, which contains many references to the history of cinema, does not document the departure from the reactor complex—the plant, production and progress—but rather the void, the secret and the threat that it contains.
The series Encyclopedias expresses a yearning for an aesthetic form of absolute knowledge coupled with revulsion from the actions of man. The encyclopedias of 1908 seek to bring together all of world knowledge in beautiful volumes. The two world wars had not yet taken place, and the new century seemed promising and hopeful. Shlosberg-Yogev plays with the encyclopedias, adding simple mechanisms and creating childish games of beauty and magic, combined with documentary material from nuclear experiments.
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns offers a sensory preoccupation with existential questions: our relationship with nature, issues of control and restriction, and various aspects of art’s approach to nature—from observation to framing, from intervention to withdrawal. The human presence at the exhibition, mediated through camera and word, gives all of these fascinating interpretations and a great beauty.
– Lea and Diego
Video works: Photographer: Itamar Mender-Flohr | Actor: Eyal Flumendorf | Video Edition and Post Production: Ofek Shemer and Ada Rimon
“Watch From a Safe Distance” – Sound Editing: Ofek Shemer and Ada Rimon | Electronics: Amir Bolzman
Books – Electronics: Omri David | Cannon mechanism: Itamar Mendes-Flohr |
Monitors: Yaniv Sheinfeld
Thanks: Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Ori Mizrachi , Alon Gaash, Galia Lulko, Nava Frenkel, Michael Marziano – Israel Train, Eytan Yogev
Mamuta Art and Research Center
Directors: Sala-Manca | Mamuta Staff: Yoav Fisch (technical advisor and show installing), Tamar Drozd ( office, production) | Graphic Design: Maya Shleifer