Then Suddenly, For Ever and Ever
Eiv Kristal and Nurit Dreamer
Curators: Sala-Manca
Eiv and Nurit grew up in different places: Nurit grew up in Jerusalem, Eiv grew up in Rome. Yet their childhoods share an intimate bond of unexpected disaster. Eiv’s father died in a motorbike accident, and Nurit’s mother in a car accident. Nurit was four, and Eiv was ten. These fatal moments were a turning point in their lives. But the years passed, and their lives went on. The tragedies became memories, and sometimes, even a humorous joke. Death awoke and fell asleep, drawing them into surprising adventures.
Then Suddenly, For Ever and Ever turns the Mamuta Art and Research Center into a set for a film based on Eiv and Nurit’s life stories and fantasies—a film that will never materialize. In Mamuta, their personal memories are encapsulated into a sequence of semi-fictional scenes arranged in cinematic language, and merged into a single story.
The exhibition spaces are turned into scenes from the un-filmed film. The artists’ preoccupation with overexposure, close-ups, long-shots, and the narrowing of the field of view relies on the language of cinema. The viewer enters the frame, a foreign figure moving within other people’s stories. The exhibition’s sounds flow throughout the scenes of the film, creating a unique sense of parallel events in time.
Cinema has the ability to evoke places or moments otherwise unconscious, to distort memories, to enrich or erase them. Eiv Kristal and Nurit Dreamer have chosen art as a way to access, confront, and rework their personal stories. They do not attempt to reconstruct the tragic past, but rather, to give it new life. They play with their memories of the accidents, deliberately opening a dialogue with them. Art and cinema, like dreams, have the ability to shape reality. Visitors to the exhibition embark on a journey through Eiv and Nurit’s pasts. The moments recast in the spaces of Mamuta become tangible, poetic, dense, present, full of humor and tragedy, sometimes morbid, and sometimes optimistic.
Kristal and Dreamer are completing a residency program at the Mamuta Art and Research Center’s Academy of the Contemporary. This is their first exhibition; as graduates of the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem they dealt primarily with performance. During their year in residence at the Center, they also curated the Censorship Archive as part of the exhibition Barbarians. The thin line between what is revealed and what is concealed, between the personal and the public, is an ongoing theme of their work.
The exhibition is being held as part of Intersections program of the Jerusalem Film Festival, with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Foundation.
Mamuta Art and Research Center
Founders & Directors: Sala-Manca Group
Project Management & Administration: Shahar Ben-Nun | Technical Advisor: Yoav Fish | Sound Consultant: Amir Bolzman
Office and Production: Tamar Drozd
Thanks to, Niv Gafni, Nachmi Dreamer, Anat Dreamer, Natan Odenheimer, Shir Kristal, Beki Kristal, Eden Kristal,Vivian Ostrovsky, Tal Yahas and to the Resident Artists of the Mamuta Center: Yehudit Shlosberg-Yogev, Sagit Mezamer and Amir Bolzman