The 2015 Venice Biennale opens next week, if you can wrap your head around such a thing. Here, we offer you a first look at the Israeli Pavilion, with work by Tel Aviv-based artist Tsibi Geva and curated by Hadas Maor. Geva’s installation covers the pavilion in over a thousand used black tires, exported from Israel, and “impregnated with a distinct [odor],” according to the biennale’s organizers.
“It is a multi-layered structure that gives way to Geva’s sophisticated play with notions of blockage and penetration, harshness and softness, western and eastern,” Maor said in a written statement, adding that “the Israel/Palestine conflict is not the subject of the works or the project at large, but it is embedded into Geva’s identity, consciousness and art in such a way that it could be described as an undercurrent motivating it, as has been the case throughout his career.”
Maor goes on to describe the arc of Geva’s work as “pervaded by the impossible complexity of Israeli-Palestinian existence, and is imbued with a painful, sober and harsh awareness.”
