In Israel, Artists Engage With East African Immigration and Netanyahu’s Southern Wall

 

For his first solo exhibition with Dvir Gallery, Austrian artist Florian Pumhösl created a two-part series of sculptural works, shown on two separate floors in the gallery’s spacious south Tel Aviv location.

Currently on view is only one part of the show “Formed Speech,” which features six plaster paintings evocative of chalk writings on a school blackboard. The fine white-grey figures set against a dark green background are words written in the Ge’ez script, or fidäl, used in modern Amharic and Tiringya, languages spoken by the east African refugees. But what starts as legible sentences that spell out “My land,” “My water,” “My air,” or “My horse” gradually disintegrates in the sequence of works into isolated phonemes, signifying less and less as each piece deconstructs the markings even further, until they are entirely de-familiarized.

 

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