Portfolio: South as state of mind: a hot wind from the South is blowing in Western art
The portfolio curated by Hadas Kedar presents the South as a state of mind, that is not only a geographic region or a socioeconomic site, but also an artistic stance and inter-artistic or para-artistic action that disrupts years-old Northern cultural arrangements. It is a speculative exhibit comprising three projects. A video piece by the Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud, in which the artist enters a historic museum of classical art, interferes with her body in its mode of display, and inserts into it legends and oral traditions, is understood as a challenge to the method of museal organization and the history that it portrays. The action of the “New Mineral Collective,” which turns to the North Pole and takes action against its mining and resource exploitation, shows a slow and meditative exposure of remnants of the landscape, which is devoid of human presence but speaks of the impact of human actions on it. The third project is not artistic per se: it is an agricultural farm in Wadi Atir in the Negev that experiments with traditional agricultural methods, studies them, and applies them. Kedar attempts to understand the farm in relation to the extra-museal land art and in relation to national and corporate soil improvement, and to see it as a combined act of social action and artistic practice of manufacture, study and representation – an act that turns to forms of local knowledge in order to establish Southern modes of work and ways of knowing.