"On the one hand, it can be asserted that the society and culture in which art from Israel flourished, the society and culture which informed it until well into the eighties, were marked, one way or another, by the principles of the Zionist ideal and myth, the consequent creation of a collective identity, the preservation and imposition of a uniform, common ideological front and the development of the vast and ambitious project of settlement. On the other hand, it now seems evident that, in the society and culture in which its contemporary artists articulate and debate today, they no longer sacrifice their expressions of difference, their individualities, their paradoxes or their conflicts on behalf of a universal idealistic façade. At any rate, the contemporary art from Israel that has been created, particularly since the nineties, and that which has been able to project itself abroad in the past decade, conveys the same sort of plurality, fragmentation, instability and contradictions characterising that of any other modern society experiencing and undergoing the questioning and transformation of its established and dominant identity brought about by continuous waves of migration, economic and cultural globalisation, and the dissemination and ubiquity of information and new technologies.

Therefore, the artists presented here neither constitute a block circumscribed to a national ideology, nor to a collective vision or a uniform aesthetic trend. Beyond the preconceived ideas and assumptions, prejudices, presuppositions and preconceptions, clichés and other notions we may have of their creations, none of them could simply be identified as "Israeli," or reveal any identifying characteristics or patterns shaping a cultural idiosyncrasy or stereotype. On the whole, the origin and context in which these selected artists develop, unfold and project their practices and their creations, their concerns and efforts, are no longer invested, absorbed, in the hope or the dreams of a common utopian society. Conceivably, the complexity and multiplicity made manifest in their works is inspired, perhaps decided, by varied and distinct conditions, circumstances and factors that are related to and characterised by the diverse cultures, languages, religions and political visions shaping Israel today.

If something characterises this group of artists as a whole, if there is something that identifies them, it is a tension between the reality in which they live, between the reality they suffer, experience, construct, shape and recreate in their works, and the inner commotion of their subjectivities. Even when they refer to social and political situations and themes, what they represent, what they project, is mostly a disturbing proposition, sometimes contained, sometimes silent, frequently indirect and always oblique, always transcending the particular and the specific to transform the concretion and reality of the Holocaust, war, terrorism, occupation and insecurity into subjective fictions of violence, fear, death and anxiety, which equally engage us all. The inwardness turns inside out, exposing, revealing the entrails of its anxiety.

Maybe it is the proximity of the trauma that causes the reality in which the Israeli artist lives on a daily basis; maybe it is the fear of simplifying, of exploiting, of exoticizing, of aestheticizing, of mistaking reality for fiction. Whatever it is, none of them seems willing to allow the constant and arbitrary whirlwind of reality, its uncertainty and its insufficiency, to undermine the extraordinary power of the imagination, to allow the chimera of the latter to succumb to the yoke of the former, as yet another one its instruments. For all these creators, art is a place of extreme ambivalence. And regardless of how many times we attempt to clothe this ambivalence with a different gap, and we shift from the effort to describe and contain the sublime to an argument of the political implications of the power and expediency of art, we will always be drawn to art as if to a spectre, the ghost of a past that still excites us and the haunting possibility of a future we think we desire. These Israeli artists eclipse temporality itself even when they try to historicize it. And as the impossible object of our conscience, the art we present here floats away into thin air as absence. If this were not so, it would only be the presence of our utter failure."

Octavio Zaya
Exhibition curator
[Fragment of the text "INSIDE-OUT: Incertitude without Illusions. Between an End and a Beginning, between Anxiety and Speculation", included on the exhibition catalogue]