Noa Gur Body vs superstructure

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  Noa Gur
  Body vs Superstructure

  June 4 - July 6, 2016

  Nir Altman Galerie is proud to present ‘Body vs Superstructure’' by the artist Noa Gur.

  Superstructure is a term that Marx used to relate to the part of human society that doesn’t directly connect to manufacture of goods, but consists of its Institutions and ideological power structures i.e: state, science, religion as well as the arts. Noa Gur’s recent work relates the way in which the individual is connected to such structures while drawing parallels between vision and visibility with regard to Civil status and recognition.

  The participants in the video installation entitled “Ways of Making Visible” are foreign Pupils and`others t́ o the territories of Israel and Germany, where both the pupils as well as the artist herself lack permanent residency status respectively. In the Installation pupils of refugee and migrant backgrounds, part of whom are threatened by deportation, visit the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The visitors use flashlights to illuminate Showcases that hold sculptures of cubist and primitivist style, as they cast shadows that appear to be disintegrating on the walls. The pupils’s visibility alternately disappears and reappears behind the blinding glare of their flickering flashlights.

  The self portrait “Painting on All Fours” again relates to a point of view that pretends to embody neutrality to determine a standardised Shape and appearance that coincides with the impetus of the powers that dictate it.
  In the above mentioned piece, which consists of two photos, the artist hangs suspended from a white wall and then leaves traces that could be recognised as dirt. In the Video work “Apex” an object is seen from a “satellite” overhead angle that acts as the quasi All-seeing supervisor that, however, disguises more than it illuminates.

  Another part of this exhibition features two photos from an ongoing project entitled
  “Logistics of Integration” which proposes absurd solutions for the complicated predicament that the current Refugee Crisis has left Europe in.

  Issues such as acute housing shortages give way to Reactionaries voicing criticism that can culminate in raising doubts over integration within the so called German or European social and moral constructions. The Pictures are set in public areas where they attempt to utilise space sparingly so as not to interfere with the everyday circumstances that local citizens engage in. The artist herself is the model for the visual simulation in these situations.

  Noa Gur was born in Holon, Israel in 1980 and currently resides and works in Berlin, Cologne as well as her native Tel Aviv. She has internationally exhibited in museums, galleries and art-fairs such as the Braverman Gallery, Tel aviv, the Herzeliya Museum, Herzeliya; Gallery Campagne Premiere, Berlin; Museum “Kunst im Tunnel”, Düsseldorf; Museu MAN Nuoro, Italy; Artissima Artfair, Turin; to mention a few. In 2013 she won the art grant “Kunstfonds Bonn”, Germany, and spent the following year, 2014, at the prestigious “Artport” residency, Tel Aviv. In 2015 she was awarded the “Prize for young artists” by the ministry of culture, Israel. Some of her works are contained in private and public collections, among those, the Goetz Collection in Munich and Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris.

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