AD_DRESS: Thoughts On Garments

The exhibition sets out to explore the ways in which contemporary artists use garments, presenting the dress as a de-contextualized object. Throughout history there has always been a correlation between the function of covering and the meaning reserved for the dress in art; in the 20th century, however, the object was decontextualized, and given a new, critical reading, which emphasized its significance as a representation of an absence. The function of covering and its socio-cultural meaning maintain a controversial relationship of cause and effect. The garment, by definition wraps the body, covers and protects it, partitioning between the body and its surroundings while making it possible to identify and place it in the hierarchies of social and cultural existence. On one hand, it has a universal, timeless function imprinted in the myths and rituals of human existence; on the other hand, it is influenced by changes of time and place. Between functionalist and surrealist modernism, the garment – in its sense as a cover – often contributes to exclusion and erasure of the wearer’s identity.

The preoccupation with the garment takes us back to our beginnings in two senses: to basic existence in nature, as well as to the idyllic image of the biblical Garden of Eden and the myth of Creation. The garment is a made object which, from the very outset, assumed symbolical layers as something which was not invented by man, but rather given to him by God as a second skin (“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them”; Genesis 3: 21). The garment plays a key role in the rituals of the past as well as in modern culture, embedding a baggage of identity, religion and secularism. Modesty, for example, is a key value in most institutionalized religions. In times of fundamentalist extremism, dress serves as a means of control under the guise of protecting either morality or national-religious identity.

The dress and clothing were barely treated in Israeli art up until the 1980s, mainly due to avoidance of themes considered “feminine” and thus inferior. Only towards the end of the decade did a critical engagement with images of clothing emerge. Through the defamiliarization they initiate as means of hiding or dividing, the garment images in the exhibition extract a new life from the object.

The artists participating in the current show revisit the image of the dress which has already acquired a foothold in visual language. The contexts have expanded, as well as the techniques. The treatment of the image ties private and public, low culture and high culture, periphery and center, developing social issues concerning geopolitics, gender, ethics, and aesthetics.
Participating artists: Nelly Agassi, Gili Avissar, Itzik Badash, Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, Drora Dekel, Belu Simion Fainaru, Raafat Hattab, Michal Heiman, Zvika Kantor, Uri Katzenstein, Shosh Kormush, Yigal Ozeri, Rivka Potchebutzky, Tamar Raban, Philip Rantzer, Lee Yanor.