TEL AVIV.- “Moderate Physical Pressure,” a solo exhibition by Manar Zuabi (b. 1964, lives and works in Nazareth) at the Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv-Yafo, displays the artist’s distinctive visual language – one that relies on a limited range of materials and on repetitive, accumulative gestures that gradually transform the space. Since the early 2000s, Zuabi has been creating site-specific installations and spatial interventions using simple materials such as wool yarn, nylon stockings, hairpins, pencils, and shoelaces. Alongside these works, she developed a body of performance-based works, sometimes with co-collaborators, in front of an audience or a camera. While Zuabi’s artistic practice is often discussed separately in the contexts of installation and performance, this exhibition emphasizes the open and flexible structure shared by her entire oeuvre, and the ways in which it is grounded in the presence of – or in reference to – the body.
The term “Moderate Physical Pressure” entered Israeli discourse in 1987 following the Landau Commission, a state inquiry established to examine interrogation methods used against Palestinian detainees. The commission sanctioned the use of methods that, in practice, amounted to abuse and even torture. As a bureaucratic euphemism that is meant to essentially white-wash matters of policy, the exhibition title illuminates the subtle ways in which mechanisms of power and control are manifested. Zuabi reminds us that the body is a field in which power, vulnerability, and endurance coexist. Moreover that every artistic act holds within it a struggle for visibility, and, in her words, a “ceaseless attempt to free ourselves from our dependence on hegemonic structures.”
At CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo, Zuabi presents in the Ground-Floor Gallery a new site-specific installation in materials characteristic of her early works — primarily wool yarn and nylon stockings. Responding to the unique architecture of the Center, Zuabi, together with five young artists who collaborated with her in the creation process, delineates the space and draws within it using taut lines of wool and thin, translucent layers of nylon. The installation shifts constantly with each change of viewpoint, evoking perspectival lines that attempt to capture an elusive image. A single pair of pantyhose comprises each layer, preserving human scale – like a ghostly presence hovering in the space. The stockings are stretched to the point of near-tearing, held in a delicate threshold between fragility and resilience.
On the upper floor, selected works in video, sculpture, and drawing reveal a material and bodily language of quiet resistance. Through such actions as splattering paint, unspooling thread, chipping away at walls, peeling and hiding, Zuabi’s works register gestures that exist in the space between appearance and disappearance. In the video work I've Seen Neither Houses Nor the Road, which was inspired by the text Arabs’ Bread by the Palestinian writer Hassan Khader (who also serves as the video’s narrator) the camera gropes in the darkness in a field of mallow in disorientation, attempting to expose the remnants of memory. Throughout her work, Zuabi uses both body and matter as tools to investigate Palestinian identity in a space where its traces are gradually being erased – through deliberate policies as well as through subtler forms of political pressure. The actions she performs are devoted to leaving delicate marks, uncertain in their durability. They can be read as both a wound and a stance: a poetics of existence at the edge of erasure, where every gesture carries with it the desire to leave a trace.
“Manar Zuabi: Moderate Physical Pressure” is curated by Tamar Margalit.
