Wasteland, presented at Elovic Gallery, offers a desolation at whose center stands the gleaming remnant of the Marlboro Man, who once led the advertising campaigns of a cigarette manufacturer. At the height of his ride, he gallops over the belongings of a vanished woman. He raises a lasso cast in concrete and made of iron rods found in the backyards of Tel Aviv, as if seeking to take control of the space around him.
His figure casts over the entire exhibition space a sense of abandonment, built through two and three dimensional movements, as if sketching shapes and portraits of dystopian sites.

The works explore moments where body motions intertwine with public space, activating it and becoming entangled within it. They serve as monuments dedicated to these motions, capturing characters on their way to work or while waiting in line at the government office. A stroll down the street translates into an act of paving concrete tiles with each step, while sitting in the waiting chair morphs into a repetitive action, forming a trap. The motorcycle collision is depicted through the hammering of a steel plate onto a lying motorcycle, while the escape from the pickpocket is conveyed by unraveling the pants and exposing the pockets. Through repetition and duplication the works reimagine public space as a machine, and the movement within this space as one that disassembles the body, resembling an assembly line.

Exposed building foundations emerge from the park’s wall, either signaling the neighborhood's construction boom or being perceived as a stubborn remnant of the old landscape. The rebar cage unravel at its end, trapping the basketballs as they are thrown in the air—over the wall and into the park’s valley. In this way, the iron casted in the concrete wall becomes a heavy and rusted graphic gesture of acceleration and flight, while the basketball movement is translated into a frozen expression of trespassing within the gentrified urban space.

The works evoke situations of impermanence and detachment within the Israeli modernist space: Kibbutz Kabri and Atelier Shemi within it. The exhibition starts with the landing of a Nike basketball at the Atalia sculpture garden, its movement is depicted in a single, crooked building foundation. The presence of the foreign and detached pole stands out against its surroundings: steel plates cast in concrete podiums, express abstract and universal values, while seeking to form a local history.

Inside the atelier, an improvised billiard table acts as a model of an alternative sculpture garden, extending the graphic and narrative movement of the outdoor work. In a quick act of imitation, used and unraveled wallets are attached to the atelier’s walls in varying compositions, resembling the permanent steel works. The exhibition ends with two contrasting images - a house and a ship- coming together in a passport cover, offering narratives of displacement and migration that drive the desire for settlement and locality.

Consisting of objects I collected around my studio, the three assemblages in the installation imitate a traditional art display: busts placed on podiums, facing the viewer. This traditional definition of sculpture is confronted with the flat image as the plastic bag is stuffed with construction waste, and the rebars are bent to resemble a comic book thought bubbles, featuring the supermarket cart, cut into two-dimensional icons.

The exhibition took place in an art space located in a former bank headquarters. Elevator doors found in the attic create a two-dimensional relief, transforming the space into one of the building’s corridors. Throughout the show, the deceptive nature of the relief aims to uncover the gap between the normative appearance- the decent bureaucratic façade - and the shady bargains concealed underneath it.

The work was exhibited at the curator’s apartment during the Covid-19 lockdown. Atop of the curator’s bed, broken crowd control barriers rise from an ashtray. The barriers, remnants of a recent demonstration, reenact an escapist moment from the homeowner’s life routine in her intimate space. The work extends outside of the window frame, serving both as security bars as well as a warning sign- a cloud of smoke coming out of an apartment.

Casted from a generic ashtray mold, perforated aluminum castings are hung in the living room. By tracing the industrial repetitive production process, I was able to intervene and disrupt the final product. 

The slang term ‘Khoshmantush’ derives from the phrase “Rekhuse Natush”, which translates from Hebrew to ‘abandoned property’. Mantush is the Arabic word for ‘detached’. Together, these words phonetically resemble “kusch mein tusch”, which is Yiddish for “kiss my ass”. Avot Yeshurun, an Israeli Poet, used the phase to express the Israeli establishment’s attitude towards Palestinian property abandoned after the war of 1948. 

I was exposed to the poetry of Yeshurun through my encounter with my family story, which was the starting point of this exhibition: Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, my family, recent immigrants from Morocco, received from the state keys to an abandoned house in Jaffa in which they lived in their first years in Israel. During one of their first days in the house, my grandfather wished to plant a tree in the garden. As he was digging, he discovered a large barrel hidden in the ground, which seemed to have been buried recently. The barrel contained a vast array of valuables: housewares, bedsheets, tablecloths, and other precious ornaments. The new owners found an appropriate use for each of the items found in the loot. The sheets, beautifully decorated with embroidered peacocks, were turned into the walls of my family's Sukkah. A Japanese set of porcelain tableware was used for special occasions. Of all the contents of the barrel, only two teacups from the Japanese porcelain set survived. They were left in my grandmother’s possession, and I inherited them this year, following her passing.  This work was first presented in my graduate exhibition in Bezalel. The installation was created out of the storage systems and the remnants of material within the workshop which also served as the exhibition space. The installation intended to evoke the moment of the discovery of the barrel and transfer it into the workshop of Bezalel. The video work accompanying it scans the ‘Root Research Laboratory” in Tel-Aviv University, documenting the man in charge of maintaining it since it stopped functioning as a site for experiments.