Radical Humanism

This project is an attempt to defeat and subvert by the means of its target, the notions of racism and hierarchical perception of progress regarding the human condition.

Through an act of excision and “acting out” the despicable, the artists are striving to evoke and exaggerate the emotions which are associated with cultural traumas by embodying them in the most intimate psychic states and scenarios.

Our protagonists are characterized by the obsession to communicate which leads them to overact their psyches’ deepest distortions including a lack of sexual and ethnic identity.

This is what lies at the root of the exhibition and runs throughout the never ending and repetitive act of the paintings as pseudo death masks, the performance as ready made snippets of reality puzzled together in a vibrant pulse of rage and disgust standing for banal and redundant states of mind, as video works which act timelessly in the viewer’s consciousness, in works on paper which exist as short poems.

Our collaboration had begun with the publication of disembodied archetypes, a joint artists’ book published in 2009 by Regency Arts Press which formed an initial stage for the phrasing of a visually associative manifesto of the creative modes, source materials and inspirational resources. This book was followed by three collaborative exhibitions, each of which included an installation of videos, photographs, paintings and a performance.This exhibition was a ripening of this ongoing collaboration and enabled a symbiosis of raw materials and artistic subject matter while preserving the authors’ autonomic artistic voice.

Tamy Ben Tor & Miki Carmi

December 2013 , Brooklyn New York