Die Konservenfabrik Phoenix befand sich im Ortsteil Pysdorf der Gemeinde Raasdorf bei Wien. Zwischen 1944 und 1945 wurden dort 66 ungarischen Jüdinnen und Juden zur Zwangsarbeit festgehalten – unter Ihnen die Urgroßeltern Revital Arbels Mor und Ethel Polacsek und drei Großtanten mit ihren Kleinkindern. In der Monarchie hat Mor in Wien Malerei und Derschmidts Urgroßvater Heinrich Reichel Medizin studiert. Revital ist Ärztin und Friedemann ist Künstler geworden. Alle Kinder Heinrichs waren radikale Nationalsozialisten.
Phoenix handelt von einer Liebe verbunden und verstrickt in einer gemeinsamen Geschichte
Phoenix von Revital Arbel
Einladung zur Ausstellungseröffnung Di, 22. Oktober um 18 UhrStudio Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber, Glockengasse 6, 1020 Wien
Die Wandzeitung
Seit 2010 stellt das Künstlerkollektiv Steinbrener/Dempf & Huberdie Schaufenster seines Studios, ein ehemaliges Wäschegeschäft im 2. Bezirk für Ausstellungen zur Verfügung. Bernhard Kellner und Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber entwickelten dafür die „Wandzeitung“. In über 50 Ausgaben wurden gemeinsam mit Künstler:innen und Wissenschaftler:innen gesellschaftliche Sachverhalte verhandelt. Diese Ausstellungen sind für den urbanen Raum konzipiert.
upcoming exhibition! Opening: 6. Feb. 2024 at the Barbur Gallery / Jerusalem
Revital Arbel is a surgeon, obstetrician, and artist. She performs pelvic reconstruction surgeries, repairs vulvar and vaginal tears and scarring, and creates new vaginas in Sexual reassignment surgeries. She also restores virginity as a life-saving procedure. She delivered hundreds of babies and mothers. She uses photography and embroidery to express her feelings and thoughts about her job and the injustice she observes in the hope of promoting a change. As a surgeon, Revital Arbel specializes in fusing, repairing and healing human ruptures. As an artist she has chosen to continue using needle and thread to generate intervention and repair.
“As an artist I use photography and embroidery to process and express my feelings and thoughts about the relationship between my profession and the world around me. I am in the process of creation. While I’m analyzing and while I’m an artist I’m engaged in creation, processes, thinking and turning ideas into action. Art is everything to me both when I am »working« (as a doctor) and when I am »creating« the two fields are parts of the same whole. There will be a correction for the injustices I encounter as part of my work as a doctor and as a woman. For me it is not a combination but the same »thing.«”
“My name is Revital Arbel and I am a gynecologist and a pelvic floor, vagina and vulva surgeon. I treat women of every kind imaginable, Israelis and Palestinians, secular and ultra-orthodox, women born in a female body and women born in a male body and men born in a female body and everything in between, women from here women from there, blue ID card, orange ID card, transit card, refugee card and those, well, statusless. After literally thorough research on the subject, I come out with an unsurprising statement, everything is the same, there is no difference, the same pain, the same blood, the same meat, the same milk, under the sky and maybe beyond the clouds they are all the same and need more or less the same things. Food and water!”
The association “Darchi-Haybet for Art” was established in 2024 following the outbreak of the “Iron Swords” war and the need for a strong “home” for the sake of Israeli society. The founders of the association are Carmit Weizman and Yoel Weizman. Carmit has been working for many years in the field of creation and modern art alongside working in art with mentally challenged people, Yoel is an electrical engineer and lecturer who over the years led and managed the young community in Kibbutz Sdot Yam. The ambition of the association’s founders is to connect art with the community in order to create personal and community resilience by holding exhibitions, meetings, activities, creative workshops, and artistic accompaniment for people who have found themselves in the circles of loss and anxiety in Israel.
Indeed, the members of the association, the artists and creators see art as a significant tool for strengthening, providing balance and healing for the soul. In the words of Carmit Weizman, the curator of the exhibition: “Our choice is to look at things from a higher perspective, to connect with our soul and the creative energy of the universe. Precisely in this period of darkness, Pain and sadness create an opening for the expressions of the forces within us, which try to break through and shine.”
The association organizes and offers creative meetings with an experience of relaxation, creates places and meetings where you can release emotions and experiment with a new, strengthening and growing creation. The artists of the exhibition each present in their own special and original language ways of dealing with difficult subjects and motifs, most of them related to everyday life here and now.Participants in the exhibition: Adi Avidor, Shiral Gabbai, Sheila Oringer, Roital Arbel, Ilana Belsen, Shlomi Ben-Yiker, Lotem De Bar, Rami Ram Yogev, Sion Cohen, Gilad Kahana, Hila Lizer-Beja, Sarit Lila-Has, Einat Magal Shamali, Reot Mishori, Polly Max, Kobi Siboni, Yael Segal, Amit Pardes, PASE, Yehuda Roth, Limor Tzaror, Hila Ram-Tamari, Noya Shiloni-Habib, Rossello Shamaria and Maurice Cohen.
The opening of the exhibition on October 9, 2024 at 18:00
Doron Polak / Carmit Weizman – curators of the exhibition
Sewing hands, brushstrokes, camera clicks, and handmade prints – these are the diverse techniques employed by the creators in this exhibition, members of the Faculty of Medicine. Nine artists have imprinted drearns woven in their private rooms onto paper and canvas, creating a world for themselves which now is revealed to us. With one click of the camera button, Aviv Halfen chooses to create compositions that, through computer processing, forge a newrealm; a realm in which the artist seeks to glimpse the child within, his family, and their embrace and understanding that he so needs. Avli Rubinstein’s brushstrokes are soft and thick, highlighting the human texture crecited by his figures. Azaria Rein paints in a classicstylethe heart’ssilhouette emerging through the light he casts on thesurface ofthe portrait, which looks back at us, the viewers. Michael Steinitz’s crayon and pastel hues invite us to lyrical and abstract landscapes of the land, where everyone can choose where they want tobe. The wonderful, hidden world teeming underthesurface ofthewater is revealed to our eyes through the camera lens and the eye of Nir Friedman. Daniel Z ilberscheid’s scienti fi c an d chemical realm allows him to shed new light on manual printing techniques. A colourful world is transformed into countless shades of black and white. In Assel Saadi’s still life paintings, the walls of her childhood home are rendered in oils – those very walls that became the canvas for her early artistic expressions. The flame in the painting embodies her internal driving passion. The entrancing gaze Eleanora Medvedev seeks in the eyes of th e women sh e photogr aphs is enveloped in soft fabrics and gentle light. Revital Arbel’s hand embroiders a woman, heals a wo man, heals h ersel f – g ivi ng agency to the aching, wounded body. Her journey between lndia and Israel is rendered as a colorful embroidered medical stamp. The lives above and below the surface coalesce into the artists’ personal expressions, an inward gaze outward and displayed in the exhibition.
Michal Mor, Curator, The Hebrew University
In this selection of artwork:s by members of the Faculty of Medicine, personal and poetic channels of expression, complementing the creators’ professional routines in the fields ofscience and medici ne, are presented for the first time. The tapestry of voices and artistic pieces inhabits the shared human and cultural space of the faculty community, attesting to its resilience and multifaceted nature. The realms of healing and creativity have always been closely and fruitfully intertwined -twoworlds in dialogue with each other. The exhibition of photographs of the diverse artworks, situated at the intersection of paths leading to the medical faculty buildings, seek:s to manifest these connections and encounters between physical healing, mental healing, healers, patients and the various roles within the medical professions. Our thanks tothe creators participating in the exhibition: Revital Arbel, Nir Friedman, Avrv Halfen, Eleonora Medvedev, Azaria Rein, Avery Rubinstein, Assel Saadi , Michael Steinitz, Daniel Zilbeisheid.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to everyone who helped in the realization ofthe project.
Anat Reches, initiator and producer of the exhibition, Faculty of Medicine
The AFTER FLOODING exhibition was inspired by the ecological crises and the corona epidemic that have plagued our world in recent years. A reality saturated with intense fluctuations, which provokes a rethinking of the interrelationships between the individual and the collective and between man and the environment and nature. The term “after the flood” refers to a continuous time dimension, linking the phenomenon of the flood itself, which is experienced in its full force, and the new situation, which exists after the flood. Floods in nature cause damage or substantial changes in their environment.
Emotional flooding is a response of our system to the existing load in it and it has consequences and influences about the way we think and act. The artists relate to the theme of the exhibition in different aspects and work in various types of media. Some even share an art project shared.
Avivit Blas Baranes and Reuven Zahavi present a joint painting installation, called “Tectonia”. Blas Baranes focuses on natural phenomena such as: sinkholes, tsunamis and landscapes that have collapse and chaos. Reuven Zahavi focuses on researching ignorance, changes and shocks that happen above and below natural ground surfaces, which were burned with traces of a fire, which broke out near the mental health center – Eitanim in the forests of Jerusalem. Aryeh Ofir deals with the concept of “interference”, the client from the world of physics. When two waves (water, sound, electromagnetic waves) smashing one against the other, a third wave is formed. In the jug works and his digital works, Ofir creates interferences between cultures, urban landscapes with nature and photographs of nature, as an integral part of Jars. Klil Wexler in her work “Remains”, presents an installation that includes: charcoal drawings and objects such as a coat, a sooty book and fossils soaked in polyester tar and latex. It refers to the oil spill, which contaminated the Ervat Evrona Reserve in the southern Negev, on the fourth of December 2014.
It was an ecological disaster, one of the most serious in Israel. Revital Arbel and Friedeman Derschmidt, artists and a couple in life, share a multimedia work called “Connected”. They reveal and document a video meeting, conversations, situations, thoughts and emotional outpourings, in their daily life since the time of the Corona epidemic until today. The physical distance between Vienna – Derschmidt’s place of residence and Jerusalem – Arbel’s place of residence and the ongoing time plays a significant and essential role in their video work.
Uzi Varon, a photography artist, who lives and works in Helsinki, refers in his panoramic work “Feel me, hear me”, 2021-2022 to the difficult feeling of loneliness, isolation and lack of contact that characterize the difficult days of quarantine during the Corona period. Veron presents a collage photographs consisting of two parts including portraits of forty subjects (family members and friends) taken in Renaissance style in his studio. Dana Melman Shaked in the work “They see us as we see them”, focuses on the study of the brain and the sensations, thoughts and emotions that flood the brain. She particularly refers to the connections between the parts of the brain as they are visually expressed in an MRI scan represented as a matrix. The autistic spectrum. Yonatan Eyal presents a floor work called “From the inside to the outside” in which a photographed image of a sewer cover appears and a caption refers to his criticism of social and moral censorship, which concerns the freedom of human rights and gender. Sima Liebster in “Remains” places objects made of porcelain, which cast their image on the wall using lighting fixtures. The objects are reminiscent of fragile fossils or crystals taken from the sea, a kind of remnants that herald about natural systems that began or a life that was interrupted. Paper artist Ziva Wagner Epstein presents objects made of hand-woven paper and linen threads called “Escape Path”, they seem to be evidence of extinct life forms. The paper artist Sefi Gal also refers to water flooding. She shows a paper relief called “Crack” and a temporary structure – “untitled”, partially torn, made of absorbent paper and adhesives, using the two-and-a-half method. Paper artist Alex Schneider presents a series of works called “The Weight of the Spirit”, made of different types of paper, acrylic paints and wood.
It marks the path of the wind, inspired by storms, ships and ships.
