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May 2022
This site is in the process of construction and is therefore still exposed to technical difficulties, errors and the need for proofreading. Vigorous actions are also being taken to locate the copyright holders, regarding some of the photographs that appear on the website.
ABSALON SQUARE WAS INAUGURATED IN THE NAME OF THE ARTIST IN ASHDOD
March 2022
Absalon Square was inaugurated at the intersection of Rogozin and Moshe Dayan streets in Ashdod on Wednesday, March 2, 22, at 10:00, in the presence of the Mayor of Ashdod - Dr. Yehiel Lasri, the parents of Avshalom-Elie and Adele Eshel and guests.
VITAL SIGNS
February 2023 – June 2023
Pulse & Breathing Rhythm in Contemporary Art
Participating artists: Absalon, Sharon Azagi, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cabessa, Lilach Chitayat, Sophie Dupont, Regina José Galindo, Gideon Gechtman, Douglas Gordon, Inbal Hoffman, Dikla Moskovich, Avi Sabah, Alma Shneor, Dor Zlekha Levy
Our lives depend on the flow of air and blood. Every movement and sensation are activated by an internal rhythm of air that is drawn into the lungs and then exhaled, and of blood that flows from the heart and ultimately back. The body operates like a well-designed machine, whose complex systems are hidden from view under the skin. The exhibition presents works in which the hidden rhythm of breathing and the pulse is given a visual and vocal expression; works that penetrate the depths of the body and expose the invisible. The internal mechanism that sets the body in motion opens onto the surface, and the boundaries between interior and exterior blur.
The pulse and breathing rates are among the vital signs by which physicians determine whether a person is healthy, sick, or dead. The vital signs are directly affected by one's emotional state: they change in moments of calm or excitement, fear or infatuation. The exhibition features some of the real products of these vital signs in works of art from the past twenty years. Lines, lights, and sounds are generated as the work of art is adapted to the heartbeats and the cycle of inhalation-exhalation, which determine the structure of the work. This rhythm—whether calm and regular, fast and fidgety, or completely still—may guide one into the depths of consciousness. Alternatively, it can make us conscious of those who are bleeding or those who have been deprived of air to breathe.
Post Scriptum. A Museum Forgotten by Heart
October 2024
The video art piece "NOISE" (1993), Absalon, will be featured in the Post Scriptum exhibition; A museum forgotten by heart. The exhibition will run from October 4, 2024, to February 16, 2025.
THE SEVEN YEARS OF ABSALON
May 2022
Documentary film: Israel 2022, 60 min, Hebrew, English and French, Hebrew & English subtitles
Meir Eshel, a 22-year-old beach-boy from Southern Israel, buys a one-way ticket to Paris and re-invents himself as an artist calling himself Absalon. He quickly rises to art-scene stardom, showcased by the most prestigious museums worldwide: the Venice Bienalle, Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Modern Gallery London, Israel Museum.
Absalon’s success was short-lived – almost 7 years pass since his arrival in Paris until his tragic death, during the peak of his success at the age of 28.
More than 25 years later, his younger brother Dani Eshel’s first assignment as estate manager – is to sell Absalon’s final art piece.
Through his journey we learn about the life of a unique Israeli artist.
Created by & Script: David Ofek, Amit Azaz
Production: David Noy, Yoram Ivry
Production Company: Cinemax Productions Ltd.
Editing: Yarden Kum
Cinematography: Yoram Ivry
Research: Amit Azaz, Sharon Hammou
Sound Design: Rotem Dror
Music: Asaf Talmudi, Yuval Goldenberg, Didi Erez
Source: Cinemax Productions Ltd
Supporters & Broadcasters: Yes Docu, Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Mifal HaPayis
ABSALON ABSALON
June 2021
Exhbition at CAPC, Bordeaux, France
With: Absalon, Alain Buffard, Dora García, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Mona Hatoum, Laura Lamiel, Myriam Mihindou
The group exhibition Absalon Absalon takes the prematurely interrupted work of the Franco-Israeli artist Absalon as its starting point and proposes new interpretations via a selection of works by other artists of his generation and a network of conceptual and formal affinities. Best known for his Cellules (Cells) – geometric, architectural constructions painted in immaculate white which the artist conceived and constructed to live in – Absalon’s practice has often been considered part of a genealogy of avantgardes, a continuation of abstract radicalism, both generic and idealised, disconnected from worldly contingencies. Without wanting to overlook the harmony between Absalon’s work and a certain historic teleology, this exhibition interrogates intent and meaning by proposing a more subjective, political and embodied approach.
From a large selection of his drawings, models, sculptures, maps and built-to-scale prototypes, we attempt to show how Absalon’s work – whose linear trajectory ought to have led to a life-long project that would have surpassed the field of art – can be articulated around unique new ways of thinking. In retrospect, beneath the surface-level minimalism of his works, Absalon penetrated a multitude of social, affective and psychological questions all of which concern the emancipation of a physical body from a political body. His Cellules are less claustrophobic or deductive than they are built-to-scale mental and physical spaces: both protected and connected. They may almost be seen as bio-parasitical devices that function as a place for living and care in an environment considered by the artist as the sum of various agendas and determinants set by a culture his work would allow him to liberate himself from. They may almost be seen as bio-parasitical devices that function as a place for living and care in an environment considered by the artist as the sum of various agendas and determinants set by a culture his work would allow him to liberate himself from.
As a way of providing comparisons with this concrete utopia, and as part of a logic which is less dialectical than it is an opening of possibilities, we have chosen works by eight artists (Alain Buffard, Dora García, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Mona Hatoum, Laura Lamiel, Myriam Mihindou) that we believe will generate multiple perspectives. Dissimulated amongst Absalon’s œuvre, these works should be viewed as couriers that allow for the transmission of cultural, spiritual, identarian, poetic and sentimental questions that go beyond Absalon’s primary monolithic and often impenetrable approach. This programme places Absalon’s searing career retrospectively: not within the hypothetical spirit of his time – the 1990s – but rather as part of a network of political, formal and affective resonances whose echoes can still be heard today.
The reconsideration of Absalon’s work almost thirty years after his death necessitates a reflection of his singularity as well as his proximity to a certain generation of artists that emerged onto the international stage at the turn of the nineties. Absalon’s work – extended entirely towards a will to live and on his own terms – should be situated with those artists who, particularly in the context of the fight against AIDS, put aside any prevarication which had once separated activism from artistic practice in order to immerse themselves in practices motivated by the urgency and imperative necessity to exist and bear witness to this existence. These are embodied denunciations of mechanisms of oppression and determinism, made into performances and physically “incorporated”, that places Absalon’s searing career retrospectively: not within the hypothetical spirit of his time – the 1990s – but rather as part of a network of political, formal and affective resonances whose echoes can still be heard today.
Curators: Guillaume Désanges and François Piron
Barricades
July 2023
MAGASIN III JAFFA
Artists: Absalon, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Saher Miari, Shahar Yahalom.
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. […] Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 95–96.
Barricades, broken windows, fire, and destruction are the visual associations conjured up by the term “resistance.” But resistance is not always antithetical to power structures. Even when it acts against them, it is part of them, sharing methods, materials, and forms with them, existing on their margins, or reproducing them within itself. The attempt to undermine the structures of power thus involves an act of internal subversion. Resistance to power is also resistance to the power that nests within you. It identifies its traces inside itself and rejects that power via continuous acts of construction and renewal. The Israeli present is a good case in point.
The engagement with the interrelations between resistance and construction in the current exhibition was inspired by the works of Absalon (Meir Eshel), who was born in Israel and worked in France from 1987 until his untimely death in 1993. His oeuvre spanned white architectural models and structures, video works and drawings, exploring the body’s place within the social and political order.[1] His last and most comprehensive project, Cells (Cellules), was a series of six habitation units for only one person, which he planned to install in six major cities around the world. Built of wood and cardboard and painted white, these minimalist, ascetic cells, designed according to his own dimensions, were meant to explore the possibility of a space of seclusion and introspection in close proximity to city life. In the explanation accompanying Absalon’s 1993 exhibition Cells at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, he referred to his Cells as part of a dialectic of resistance:
The Cell is a mechanism that conditions my movements. With time and habit, this mechanism will become my comfort. […] The project’s necessity springs from the constraints imposed […] by an aesthetic universe wherein things are standardized, average. […] I would like to make these Cells my homes, where I define my sensations, cultivate my behaviors. These homes will be a means of resistance to a society that keeps me from becoming what I must become.
Absalon, Cellules (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1993), n.p.
The exhibition features two video works by Absalon that, according to the artist, manifest the same dialectic.[2] He described the earlier work, Proposals for Habitation (1991)—shot in an abstract setting where the actor, his actions, and the objects he uses are not recognizable—as a metaphor for the manner in which social structures control and dictate the individual’s everyday life. On the other hand, referring to the second, sequel video, Solutions (1992), where he shot himself in an easily recognizable environment preforming routine actions, he described it as a series of suggested solutions to life itself, no longer a metaphor. The structure in both video works is a domestic space that provides the body with protection, while at the same time restricting and suppressing it. Narrow and claustrophobic, it does not allow room for movement, bearing resemblance to the structures where the power operates, but it is also the place from which Absalon constitutes himself as a resisting individual and as an artist.
Karmit Galili
Curator, Magasin III Jaffa, 2023
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[1] See Moshe Ninio, “Radiant Non-Vision, or the Hazy Edges of Darkness: On the Six Cells Absalon Built for Himself,” cat. Absalon (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2013), p. 205.
[2] See “I Can Say ‘No’ and Still Continue to Live,” lecture by Absalon at École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, Paris, May 4, 1993, transcribed in: cat. Absalon (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2001), pp. 257–269, trans. Maike Meinert.
