Press Release                                                                                                          

 

 

URI TZAIG

Exhibition  19/02 -  17/ 03/1998

Opening  19/02/1998  , 8 - 11 pm 

In presence of the artist

 

Uri Tzaig is born in 1965 in Israel. After a major in theatre direction, design and playwritting (School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem), he started to combine the written and the visual, and to use many mediums such as literature, installations, printed matter and more recently videos, which constitue a transition, a new critical step in his work.

 

At the last Documenta, he showed The Universal Square (1996), a film based on a football game where  two teams play with two balls.

For his first exhibition in Greece, Uri Tzaig, In addition of installations and objects, will show Play  (1996):

 

Play  is an additional situation, a continuation of the work Tzaig has created in which a game of football (soccer) is conducted with two balls (Universal Square). Instead of the standard situation wherein the rules are known in advance by all and function in such a way that the spectator-viewer can identify them, here the same set of rules is presented to the spectator-viewer against the back-ground of a different philosophical notion: there is no single purpose...” (in Art Press, June 1997)

 

A new video, produced and realised in Athens during the stay of the artist, will complete the show:

Tempo -10 minutes  is a video work of 10 minutes comprised in 10 parts (one minute each), filmed in different locations and points a serie of “real time visions”, edited with no narrative line, building a new logic and structure.

 

One ball, two balls and many balls of varying nature are a recurrent figure in Tzaig’s art: they can move in any directions, changing the rules into new possibilities of perception.

Travel and Language are a way for the artist to “un-map the world”, trough the narration and its translation, to build a new structure of communication which “has the form of a question rather than an answer”.(in the catalogue Part One, Galerie Mot& Van den Boogaard, Brussels)

Tzaig’s nomadism allows him to redefine each specific encounter with the world, familiar mode of perception are broken and an open interpretation is introduced in their place.

 

In 1997 Uri Tzaig has exhibited in Slovenija (Museum of Modern Art, Ljublijana), in France (Le Creux de l’Enfer, Art Center, Thiers and “Connexions Implicites” , Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris), in San Francisco (Refusalon gallery), in Belgium (Museum of Modern Art, Antwerpen and Galerie Moot&Van Den Boogaard, Brussel), at the Venice Biennale (Guest of the french artist Fabrice Hybert and Venice Biennale 1995), the Documenta X (Kassel, Germany), the Kwangiu Biennale (South Korea) and in Luxembourg (Gallery Erna Hecey).

 

He also published Re--experience (catalogue published for the Manifesta 1, 1996), The Universal Square (book published for the 95 Venice Biennale) and The Story Teller (book published by the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 1994).

 

 

Unlimited Contemporary Art