Kushi-Atlas, Julie M Gallery, 2013
The exhibition displays a painting installation- in which there are three suggestions for reading history and the possibility for future research. At the center there is a Map, stretching over an entire wall of the gallery space. We think of maps as a product of rational and scientific worldview, however, their making is earlier than the written language and involves a mythical dimension. Pre-modern Maps and a non-Western mapping traditions, often consolidating Geography and mysticism: when pointing the relationship between human and the world, for example.
The map / drawing, indeed does not point or teach on defined territory, but it does not deprived any concrete layer, following the move that Turjeman showed at the previous exhibition ‘white – mule’, again here, the peeling walls Topography of an old building’ that was intended for demolition in which she lives and works, is the ground of the paintings- the starting point for action.
The current exhibition invites a renewed access and observation to a map, not as a powerful rhetorical device of control and orientation in space, but as a green field and an active platform of a picturesque occurrence that returns the look toward the abstraction characterized maps.
Borges tells on a detailed map, in scale of 1: 1, which covers the entire area of an empire that, so it hides beneath the real territory, and actually merges with it: “the future generations were less devout in the cartography science, they claimed that the widespread Map is unnecessary and abandoned it to the cruelty of the sun and winter “. This Cruelty – climatically, historically, and humane, is a further dimension that exist in the exhibition – as a catastrophic moment that crosses the chronological time or as a long-term processes of extinction and creation. in the Painting Aleph-Zero, an attempt was made to create a magical presence of which was recorded in conciseness as a horrors, as the image of destruction and disaster.
The exhibition’s title, Kushi-Atlas, is a Multiplicity of names, indicating their split and linkages of multiple entities and meanings, associating the word; a Combination which brings together Western and Eastern culture and undermines the certain existence of a single Origin, a single source (Atlas the mythological figure, who dared and stuffed, the mountain range in North Africa, a book of maps; a Negro, a man who came from the land of Kush, an insult / pride word etc.).
The exhibition tells and wraps a tangle of cultural visions, geographical and Mythological- both subjective and collective; A Leakage between past and present, through a place practice, myth and image occupation, and their embodiment on the surface of the painting, is the movement which calls the rise of the fantastical from the real.