KVT / KARMA / NHA SAN STUDIO / and BELLE SHAFIR

There’s something about Nha San Studio and me that doesn’t click!

[youtube width=”700″ height=”393″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gII6RJ1utOQ [/youtube]

Perhaps it’s because I’m not an opening night sort of person – mainly because I can never get a good grip on what’s going on as I peer around the crowds so I prefer to go and see artwork when the crowds have become sparse

I’m a huge fan of Nha San and really appreciate the contemporary thrust of their exhibitions and interactive workshops etc… but for some reason just about every time I get along to Creative City to catch a show 7 times out of ten the gallery space is shut and padlocked and no apologies posted.

I always get told to have some consideration because Nha San works on a depleted budget and the smell of an oily rag and only can open at all if the volunteer workers it has co-opted can arrange their student workloads and free time pressures to assist.

Also I’ve been reminded about opening times – info to which I adhere very strictly.

I sometimes even check with one of those essential volunteers to ensure that the padlock will not be in place when next I wish to visit,

So I guess I’ll have to put up with the dose of karma that has been doled out to me and just keep hoping that next time I trudge along to the 15th floor of Creative City that that damned padlock has been removed

WHAT DID I MISS THIS TIME?

Well only Belle Shafir! One of the best contemporary artists Israel has nurtured since the early seventies when at the age of 17 she left Germany and established herself in that country.

Her parents were holocaust survivors from Poland and her latest work is based around original drawings by Shafir describing events from her childhood memories growing up in post World War 2 Germany

Here’s some text about another of her exhibitions that also revolved around memories

Shafir is essentially female art, which corresponds with the work of renowned feminist artists in the 1970s. The work’s dimensions are always on a human scale; in recent years they have become truly miniature at times, posing questions about fertility and vegetativeness. The multiple hybrid bodies she concocts oscillate in the realm between science fiction and the anxieties of an ecological cataclysm, introducing images which convey sorrow for a world preoccupied with futile mechanical reproduction instead of real processes of birth and fertility. The minimalist works in question call to mind hundreds of drawings scribbled by Shafir over the years. The unique material (horse hair), however, infuses them with power and dynamism beyond that of the pen or pencil. Shafir’s use of this charged material is all but accidental. Her parents, Holocaust survivors from Poland, immigrated to Germany after World War II, where they set up a horse farm, still managed today by her brother. Life on the farm amidst the horses, the care-giving routine, were a major part of her life as a teen. As a young woman, however, she rebelled against her parents and their way of life, immigrated from Germany to Israel, developed an artist’s career, and cut her ties with her past. The choice of horsetail hair, forty years later, after her parents had passed away, embodies a type of reconciliation with her past and a newly formed connection with the childhood origins which she had denied

HERE’S an exciting site about Shafir’s work in the first decade of this century

http://www.belle-shafir.com/en/exhibitions.php

And click here for a lot of images of her exciting work

Ah well! Someday I’ll catch up with her at a Biennale or major retrospective of her work. She’s world renowned.