Rolling Rooms

Curators: Ronny Koren and Maya Bamberger

Navok presents a new body of works, specifically designed to fit the OnCurating project space in Zurich.

Navok’s works begin with associative impressions she gathers as she roams the streets of Tel Aviv, as well as other towns in Israel’s peripheral areas. She peeps into residential spaces and commercial buildings, discovering moments of design that expose the gap between dreams and the longing for style and good taste, and their improvised, incomplete realization. Then she re-organizes those desires and gaps into abstract, strange-looking and timeless sculptural units.

In her work, Navok resonates canonical movements in art history and modern design, and embarks on an examination of Israeli Modernism in the genre’s original habitat. The visual similarity between her work and Concrete art, which took source in Zurich, is apparent to the local viewer. The influence of De Stijl is also recognizable. The colorfulness of iconic objects and the two-dimensionality of the compositions acquire volume and mass when the artist uses plain, Israeli-made utensils and materials to decode the visual reality in which she lives and works. Navok undermines the conventional perception of the materials and aesthetics she deploys, and re-exposes for our benefit qualities and traces of abstract modernism, so deeply embedded in our everyday environment that they had disappeared from view.

Navok’s tenderly presented sculptures and installations are positioned with precision, inviting the viewer to enter a poetic playground. However, their visual naiveté raises questions. Enclosed or not, all of the sculptures contain an opening into a small space, sometimes allowing one viewer to step in. The quasi-intimate encounter with familiar elements brings to the surface complexities regarding consumption, our attitude towards cleanliness and hygiene, and the politics behind the human desire for order and organization.