Gregor Schneider, 2009
In a first for our art projects, Gregor's sublime sculputural beach cells has gained added layers of political meaning by being resituated on the Herzliya seashore, Accadia Beach (suburban Tel Aviv). The restaging of the project was accompanied by an exhibition of the artist's Sculptures, Photographs and Videos at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art.
The second project, Accadia Beach, 21 Beach-Cells, is installed by Schneider at the Herzliya seashore. The work is comprised of 21 identical cells, constructed of fencing, and containing an air mattress, beach umbrella and a closed black garbage bag. Each cell redefines accessibility by means of imprisoning (like a trap). The Beach Cells function as a site of temporal-social-communal-cooperative experiment, juxtaposing reductively between concepts of public life and togetherness and of spatial definition of nature, of natural environments. Originally created in Australia's Bondi Beach and produced by Kaldor Public Art Projects, Schneider’s work deconstructs the conditions that enable us to signify the beach as a place of leisure, bonheur and liberty, confronting them with associations of immigration and asylum seekers detention camps, but also with images that enact an emergence, a social landing, a scene of both primal and terminal (a)sociality. Reconstructed on the beaches of Israel the work gains added layers of political meanings.
Ory Dessau, Curator, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
