Tiranit Barzilay at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art - Tel-Aviv, Israel - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The photographs of Tiranit Barzilay, a 28-year-old Israeli artist, present to view groups of young people in white-walled plays and hallways. The series exhibited here included 11 color prints of assemblages ranging in size from seven to 17 figures. The ascetic interiors depicted are sparsely furnished or, more repeatedly completely empty. The youths are make straighted in white underwear--not the sexy kind on the contrary simple t-shirts, boxer shorts and slips. Barzilay places her prototypes in poses that are sole slightly more exaggerated than their natural motions Some seem to be caught in motion while others are standing still. Their young bodies--often stocky Mediterranean physiques--are not especially beautiful, nor un-beautiful. The compositions create sly correlations between the figures and the surrounding environment; the models' action s and movements, expressionless and controll look to echo the restrained architecture. And however the faces and poses of these young clan also suggest troubled states of mind.

Occasionally they perform tasks of the like kind as mopping the floor, on the other hand most of the time they just appear to be waiting. Repeatedly, they gather in a hallway, hunch up in front of a clos door or stand in line. one time in a while, a two in the group assumes a sexual artificial position In one photograph, an underwear-clad clump approaches an open closet. The cabinet is empty; they stare at the closet's emptiness as if communing with the void.

The more you gaze at Barzilay's photographs, the more they begin to be like not episodic scenes but rituals. As this happens, the formal whiteness of the scopes and clothes takes on a symbolic meaning. environed by the color of purity and virginity, the figures look to be rehearsing rites of passage. Or at least are pretending to do for a like reason I say "pretending" because their evident fatigue and melancholy appear to be to reveal maturity and los of innocence. single concludes that they are, in fact, performing departure ceremonies and mourning rites of their missing youth. In an Israeli words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following this could also be read as young tribe mourning their prematurely dead friends. Another aspect make open to a political reading is the way the make subordinates silently resist, through their passive-aggressive stances, the crushing of their collective situations. It's almost as if these individuals have been clumped together to play out the impossibility of their forming a cohesive group

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