Naama Arad’s ‘Har Hazofim’ quotes the view from the window of the fictional Frank Lloyd Wright creation from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest.’ A peach-toned silken curtain intervenes between our gaze and the Xerox copies pasted to the opposite wall on which landscapes can be seen. The paternalistic presidential visages of Mount Rushmore and the modernist architecture both see their material and ideological texture inverted in the most tender of feminist veilings. The title of the work refers to the mountain of the same name, and Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem that houses the Bezalel Academy of Art founded in 1906.
In the series Kafka’s Gymnastics Heike-Karin Föll uses scotch tape to form plants collected from the urban space into mannerism-stylized monastic scripts on paper. Deploying the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘or’ she connects real father figures like the queer theorist/activist Douglas Crimp and the well-known groupie/artist Anita Pallenberg to fictive personas like ‘Miss Nietzsche’ forging new constellations. Föll thereby unfurls imaginaries of belonging and elective kinship in dysfunctional gymnastic poses.