העשייה שלי באמנות שלובה בנוכחות מתמדת במרחבים שבהם אני לומדת ומלמדת. עשיית אמנות היתה ועודנה כרוכה בהתמודדות עם שאלות מתמשכות כמו מהי עשייה של אמנות היום? כיצד משמעויות משתנות בהקשרים שונים של עשייה? כיצד מענה לשאלות הללו נמצא בזיקה לאופני עשייה ולמידה של אמנות? מרחבי למידה מאפשרים לשמור את הסוגיות הללו קרובות לעשייה, ולתת להן להשפיע ולהיות מושפעות מן הנעשה בסטודיו.
This essay is written around the art-action عطر עטרה A Guava scent collection from an artist’s point of view. It connects the decision-making process and manifestations of the scent collection to dominant convictions about the “flaws” of scent and the sense of smell in Western philosophy. According to these convictions, the sense of smell and scent have no relevance to rational thinking and/or scientific knowledge and by implication to a political debate, for three reasons: scent is volatile, the sense of smell is non-verbal, and the sense of smell is too subjective to rely on. By contrast, I argue that the supposed “flaws” of scent and the sense of smell, might, in fact, contribute in a constructive and productive way to a sociopolitical debate, as will be demonstrated by the art installation of the Guava scent collection.
Back to Present discusses the themes, filming structure, and editing process of the short film A Day Becomes (2018). The film is part of Guava, a platform for art-actions that promotes the idea of free movement and the removal of borders east of the Mediterranean. In this exposition and in making the film, I explore the possibilities of political imagination regarding regional movement across borders in relation to the phenomenon of Time.
As part of the IRG, Hoffman intended to further research, contextualize, and problematize the propositions and methods used in her artistic conversing practice, such as within the Here/Then and Now كان ועכשיו research group of artists that operated between 2018-2021 in Haifa (Israel).
Guava invites you to re-mark the road between Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Beirut. The mark will be done by using a guava shaped stencil that can be downloaded from the website and sprayed at any point on the route between the two cities.
Thalia Hoffman details the production of her film Sham, part of a larger series that considers Israeli-Palestine relations in the wider Middle East. Here, she uses several voices to unfold the personal and sociopolitical environment around the film’s production, involving script excerpts, theoretical reflections on art’s role within activism and diaristic reports of her on-set reflections. In relation to her project she examines Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the distortion of history, and the importance of plurality in both politics and art evidenced in the work of Hannah Arendt and Claire Bishop among others. Hoffman thereby creates a backdrop against which to process the debilitating violence that plagues Israel-Palestine relations. ‘Sham’ means ‘there’ in Hebrew, and in Arabic refers to Sham, Greater Syria, which included Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria of today.