Tamar Harpaz: Crazy Delay

Private View | Wednesday 21 March, 6-8pm

The thought that every object is a potential black box is both thrilling and threatening. When sound hits an object, it causes that object to vibrate. Its motion is invisible to the human eye. The object becomes like a diaphragm in a loudspeaker, a witness capturing the latent vibrations of a crime. Everyday objects become potential storytellers of a past that has moved them. A voice’s echoes, distortions, delays, vibrations and tremulous are all a means of detecting their origin - to hear the place they came from. 

Edel Assanti presents Crazy Delay, Tamar Harpaz’s first UK solo exhibition. Tamar Harpaz manipulates perception using optical devices and cinematic mechanisms. Bringing ageing technologies to the point of malfunction, she uses their failure as a driving force in her work. 

Crazy Delay is disorienting at first. Glass, metal and lights are assembled alongside seemingly disparate objects. A spoon, a tea cup, a musical instrument; small items that one can hide in a pocket or big instruments that one can carry on a plane. Objects that can live in the limbo between borders, that can slip between the cracks. Each object carries a history, the story of the place it came from. None of them have secret compartments - they themselves are the secret compartments, burying inside the voices and sounds they once heard.

In the installation these objects start to signal in delay, exposing their meaning in retrospect; using electricity, the signal turns into a pattern, initiating a durational audiovisual sequence akin to an unfolding cinematic plot. A total narrative emerges, the outcome of Harpaz’s composition of a written story and accompanying sonic score, which together serve as the installation’s framework. Finally the tapping of a telegraph, a Morse code, transforms into a human voice, revealing a prayer.

Tamar Harpaz graduated a BFA and MFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2005 and 2009 respectively, completing a residency at the Rijksakademie in 2016. Harpaz was the recipient of the Rijksakademie Fellowship Award in 2016, and the Wolf Fund Anselm Kiefer Prize in 2013. In 2018, she will have a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Other recent solo exhibitions include March Madness at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (Holland, 2017); Kitchen Sink Drama at Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv (Israel, 2014); Girl-to-Gorilla at Sommer Contemporary Art, (Israel, 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Rolling Snowball, 8th edition at CEAC Xiamen (China, 2017); Sense of Sound, Dordtyart (Netherlands 2017); Artricks at The Israel Museum (Israel, 2013); Reinventing the Future at MACRO (Italy, 2013); WYSIWYG at Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel, 2013). Harpaz lives and works in Amsterdam. 

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The artist extends special thanks to Asaf Hazan, Oded Rimon and Bastien Guchet.