Musrara Mix #14 is coming soon! Presented annually by the Musrara Art School, it really is an incredible mix of multimedia art by international and local artists, but what makes it truly unique is the special atmosphere and relationship between the art school and its neighborhood. Over the course of three days, from May 20 – 22, 2014, each evening will feature an abundance of experiences in and around the Musrara Campus at 9 Ha’ayin Chet Street in Jerusalem – all FREE!
The full program may be found on the Musrara website – in English!
Some highlights from the festival press release:
We live in an age where the digital screen has become our peephole into reality, a tool for framing our world view, and a mediator between us and the tangible sensory world. In recent years, there has been a yearning for warm and imperfect images, a yearning for a place where the medium is exposed, the mechanisms are structured, and our senses are expressed in an unmediated way. This is not simply a return to the analog world, but rather offers a new perspective on the analog in relation to the digital world, a balance and a creation of new hybrids spaces.
This year’s Musrara Mix Festival deals with the borders between analog and digital media, between the virtual and the tangible, as well as between the social, economic and artistic mechanisms that operate within these realms. The artists participating in the festival have been researching the world of analog images and sounds versus the contemporary reality and digital world in which we exist and act. The art works utilize a variety of methods in order to analyze the transition from analog to digital and they describe a wide range of uses of technology, through imaginative tools and content.
The exhibit includes the use of typical analog technologies, such as slides, writing, and mechanical mechanisms alongside advanced digital technologies, such as programming, computerized images and digital music. Some of the exhibiting artists examine digital images through analog means, such as the Polish artist Ryszard Was’ko, who turns digital images taken from social networks into paintings, and the Israeli artist Sharon Paz, who uses a video projector for a double purpose—for projection and for creating shadows casted by the viewers moving about—connecting these two elements in a single work.
Other artists employ digital technologies, which they disrupt or “heat up” in order to transform them into analog, as in the work of the Swiss-German artist Niki Neecke, who takes CDs, peels off the layer which contains digital data, and creates new sounds by drawing on the CDs with markers. The drawings turn into sound waves with the aid of light.
Ola Lewin will present a work in which old cassette tape ribbon is used as a material for knitting. Artist Ory Levinson and musician Adaya Godlevsky will present a joint performance piece which turns harp playing into digital notation. The German artist Bjørn Melhus will exhibit an installation made of televisions, which he uses as a sculpting material that emits color and sound. Alma Aloro and Dafna Keenan will present a radio-musical performance in which both pre-recorded musical material and live radio broadcasts are combined in the frequencies onsite.
Together with these works, this year’s festival will present two photographic exhibitions of analog film in the New Gallery: the photographic series “The Park” by Japanese artist Kohei Yoshiyuki. The series, shot in a park in Tokyo in the 1970’s, follows couples who arrive at dusk intending to use the park as a love nest. The exhibition is the result of collaboration with the Yossi Milo Art Gallery in New York.
The exhibition “Portrait-Nude-Nature Still Life” will be presented in the Derfler Gallery. The exhibition presents contemporary Israeli photographers who work in black and white analog film. Curator: Ayelet Hashahar-Cohen.
