Covering

Ronen Zien and Maya Zehavi:

20.7-17.8.23

Curator: Leah Abir

Two elements are at the crux of Ronen Zien and Maya Zehavi’s dual exhibition. One is the encounter between the two artists and their following dialog, and the other is the encounter between their artworks and the unique space of Bread and Roses Gallery, located inside the offices of WAAC-Maan Workers Organization. The space is inscribed with the fervent social and political activity that is inseparable from the art it hosts. It is saturated with ideas and meanings, as well noises and scents of the city streets surrounding it. It is within all of these that this exhibition was formalized as a constructed improvisation . 

Although their artworks are distinctly different from one another, Zien and Zehavi share a practice that is based on photography as a raw material, a state of matter and being, a medium, and a product.  For both Zien and Zehavi, photography is a generative medium: the more it is reproduced, obscured, moved away, the more its meanings become amplified and the questions at its core uncovered.

The exhibition title, “Covering,” alludes to the multilayered work of the two artists and the mechanism their practice shares: the mechanism of exploration, probing, and collecting we sometimes call research: material, visual, and cultural research. In the case of these two artists, the process of uncovering does not necessarily end with exposure. The covering itself becomes subject matter and a method producing not only artworks but a chain of inquiries – What can one see through the covering? Who might see through it?