14-20.6.2021
Created by: Ruth Kanner | Curated by: Yair Vardi
Partners in creation and performers| Shirley Gal, Siwar Awwad, Ronen Babluki, Adi Meirovitch, Bashir Nahara, Ebaa Mundir
Design: Kinneret Kisch
Beit Hagefen Gallery is proud to present the exhibition, “Tell Me Something”, a new series of Speech acts by Ruth Kanner Theater Group. The exhibition invites us to listen to the phenomenal mechanisms of the human speech – the surprising ways in which people take action with words: declaring, attacking, complimenting, threatening, seducing, exposing, covering up, creating and dismantling worlds with words. The exhibition extends over both floors of Beit HaGefen Gallery, where visitors are invited to move within and throughout spheres of speech.
The actions presented within the exhibition are based on an ongoing working process in the Hadar and Wadii Nisnas neighborhoods. Members of the group collected the random talk of passersby and residents, and tried to hunt down particles of local narratives from conversations, primarily through listening to what speech covers up, distorts, pushes aside, erases. From these speech acts, throughout the gallery's spaces, the actors perform a collection of speech patterns, speech-scapes and speech-disruptions, in which conditioning and hidden patterns are revealed.
Speech is an act that exists and fades away in time, often turning into a memory that remains etched into our psyche. The exhibits act as live-speech-performances, taking place, disappearing and reappearing while visitors are wandering around the empty walls of the gallery.
The exhibition, “Tell Me Something” is the initial attempt of the theater group in bringing together its many years of interest in the interaction between language and place, in the framework of a gallery exhibition.
The Ruth Kanner Theater Group was founded in 1998 and since then has been developing a distinct, performance language. “The corpus of Kanner's works signify the consistent line of an artist searching for the space and language of our place, era and plot” (The Theater Site). The group explores the sights and the sounds of the immediate surroundings, and its resonance in the collective psyche.
Created by: Ruth Kanner |Curated by: Yair Vardi | Design: Kinneret Kisch
Partners in creation and performers| Shirley Gal, Siwar Awwad, Ronen Babluki, Adi Meirovitch, Bashir Nahara, Ebaa Mundir |Arabic Language Guidance and translations: Siwar Awwad |Image: Ruth Gwily | Sound: Marco Milevski
Exhibition Pieces: Dudi’s Workshop, LTDb| Group Manager and Production: Shira Yovel
Thanks to all the women and men of Haifa whom we overheard, that we interviewed, and from which we sampled - whose speech helped bring this exhibition into being.