A Day’s Ending (2007)

Solo exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Curator: Shva Salhoov

The installation A Day's Ending is a place of reference that gathers into the museum images of spaces, places and times, through and in which the work of Eli Petel (b. Jerusalem, 1974) has matured. The "after" gaze passes through and then seems to turn on its tracks, like a backward gaze-movement, over and beyond the remnants and residues of the works he has created up to this point. For that gaze, Petel creates an environment of temporariness and marginality: the place is revealed as the extreme endpoint of a poor traveling market. It is an almost abandoned space, emptying of its vendors, of its materiality, its voices waning at the end of a day of small, adventurous commerce, during which old objects, bric-a-brac, pass from hand to hand, objects that carry the memory of their past and are now migrating towards a new life. Orientality, Jewishness, and commerce join together to create the elusive moment of A Day's Ending: pictures of a neighborhood synagogue (from the video Reverse), duplicated computer images of an ancient hidden parchment, a Menorah or Channukiah petering out or lighting up. The images are borrowed from the material world of Judaica, from a hidden amending rite-of-passage, progressing into a new "self portrait". The evasive features of memory flicker at the edges of that uncanny moment, prior to the vendors' closing up and the "eradication" of all signs of presence on site. The echoes of that expected departure orchestrate the moments in that poor, suggestive space and the echo of what is to be "after" functions as a sort of Haftarah. The view inscribes that which wishes to remain as tiny sparks of revealed memory, which softly lets go and cames its origins, its traces, the mark of its weighty nomadic times – between art and Jewishness and orientality, and towards past and future.