Kir B’aair (A wall at the City)

Curator: Edna Mosenso

Photos: Yaara Oren, David Adika

In City Wall no. 6, Hilla Toony Navok presents a series of 12 large-scale abstract drawings in sharp colors. Produced in collage technique in combination with colored pencils on multicolored papers, the drawings were scanned and magnified in a way that preserves the traces of manual labor.

Modernist in character, Navok’s wall piece reintroduces the tradition of outdoor commissioned wall art back into the public setting of the Israeli street – works in painting, mosaic or ceramics that, at the time, were integrated into architectural structures and typically conveyed messages pertaining to social and national themes; only occasionally were the motifs purely abstract and geometrical.

In her sculptures and drawings, Navok “follows the traces and remnants of high Modernism aesthetics in the urban, domestic and consumerist setting,” elements she regards “with irony but also with a sense of identification and a great closeness,” she says, and out of an interest for values such as “labor”, “functionality,” and the “mundane”.

Navok’s wall piece adorns the southern wall of the Tel Aviv City Hall – a building itself noted for its sculptural and geometric qualities – and appears to complement its Brutalist architecture, characteristic of the 1950s. (Plans for the building, which was completed in 1966, were devised by architect Menachem Cohen in the 1950s.)

Presented just across from the Rabin Square, the work becomes something of a stylistic homage to key figures in Israeli sculpture – but devoid of their pathos: Igael Tumarkin and his Holocaust and Revival memorial at the Rabin Square, and “Eleveation,” the monumental piece by Menashe Kadishman at the Culture Square, further down the Chen Boulevard