MoBY Hosts
Dates: 17.04.2008 – 17.07.2008
Artists: Ma’an Association, Etgar Magazine, Video 48, Alfred Gallery, The Tel-Aviv Group, ARTPOKER, Societe Realiste, Group Efes (zero), Alina & Jeff Bliumiss, Dotan and Perry, Escape Program, Jazzstylecorner, Public Movement, This is limbo, Incas of Emergency, DAKA Group
Curators: Milana Gitzin-Adiram and Leah Abir
About the Exhibition
Hospitality is both a privilege and an ethical duty, a moral decree and a structured political action that takes place in a defined time and place, between two specific players. However prior to all other aspects, hospitality is a liminal action – the threshold is the condition and site of occurrence for its appearance, and for its rapid dissolution. The condition of liminality presumes openness and transition, while always and inherently, a valid border-line that can not be made to disappear exists within it. These are the same conditions for the formation and existence of hospitality – and action with well-defined time and space, but which is so brief and transitory, that it exists mainly through the gesture, speech and action.
Throughout the three months of the exhibition, MoBY hosted an assortment of groups and co-operations from both Israel and around the world. Collective action is dynamic and social in nature. It is aimed more towards process and action than towards the production of a finite artistic object, and its sphere of activity is mostly ex-territorial in relation to the establishment (alternative venues, the street, the World Wide Web). All of these establish it as an action foreign to the museum establishment. With its entering into the museum, the group action brings its questions, and doubts and undermines the museum’s modus operandi and the traditional standards of assessment which dwell among its walls.
The groups invited to show in this exhibition manifest a variety of modes of unionizing that relate to different social forms of collectivity – from permanent associations created around a common ideology, through temporary gatherings and fictitious unions of all kinds.
