Taking in the View: Ticho House hosts new acquisitions in photography
Ticho House
Opening: 01.05Closing: 01.11
Free
Artists: Noa Ben-Nun Melamed, Dorian Gottlieb, Rafael Y. Herman, Ora Lev, Ella Littwitz, Anna Ticho Curator: Gilad Reich and Timna Seligman
For those familiar with Anna Ticho’s pastoral drawings and paintings of the Jerusalem hills, encountering her photographs – many of which are exhibited for the first time – may be surprising on two levels. First, the fact that she used photography as a tool for observation alongside working directly in nature and drawing from life is a novelty. Moreover, while her work is often associated with an emotional, unmediated, and even romantic connection to the local landscape, these photographs reveal a systematic and investigative gaze. Ticho’s familiar landscape motifs – skies, mountains, vegetation, and flowers – can be seen as a distillation of the many gazes that emerge from her photographic practice.
This approach, which considers landscape photography as a process of inquiry and meaning making, forms the point of connection between Ticho’s work and the new acquisitions from the Israel Museum’s photography collection presented in this exhibition. Most of these works were created by contemporary Israeli artists who also seek to give visual expression to the local landscape yet are not satisfied with mere documentation or with romantic representation. What they share is the use of the photographic apparatus, and all the technical mechanisms associated with it, as a means of recreating an existing landscape and presenting it in new ways – at times to the point of severing it from its original context. This process not only offers new readings of familiar environments, but also sharpens the tension between reality and representation, and between documentation and artistic interpretation.
Sfat Olam is an album and performance of electronic breathing music framed in Hebrew ambient, which was recorded in sessions of improvisation and attentive listening. Within a painful and impossible reality, Tomer Baruch and Daniella Tourgeman send gentle and healing sounds, from a place of compassion and humanity. Music that acts as a protective wall, regulating the senses, a connecting point between the listener and the world. In the performance, a conversation unfolds between two creators: dense waves of electronics against a poetic vocal warmth, inspired by the mantras of Ravi Shankar and Terry Riley, the expanding universe of Laurie Spiegel, the voice sculptures of Linda Perhacs and the songs of Arooj Aftab. This is intuitive music, born from mutual deep listening.
Tomer Baruch is a pianist, composer, producer and sound artist whose path moves between different genres and media: from the psychedelic funk of the band “Crunch 22”, through abstract lullabies and jazz-noise, to the network project Animals and Synthesizers, which creates electronic music for the natural world. He produced and mixed for many artists and wrote music for film, theater and dance.
Daniella Tourgeman is a singer, composer and songwriter, whose voice, rich and rough in its sensitivity, is one of the most recognizable in the Israeli scene. She sang with bands such as “Armon” and “Tiny Fingers” and participated in albums by Alon Eder, Ilai Ashdot, Yogev Glusman and more. At the same time, she released three solo albums, in Hebrew and English, which examine inner worlds with depth and emotional generosity, in a musical language that also knows how to carry comforting weight.
