This exhibition coupled the work of Chicago-based Israeli photo-artist Assaf Evron with that of Slovak feminist video pioneer Anna Daucikova. The immediate occasion for this pairing is a shared interest in Russian-born and/or Soviet-trained artists of little renown but substantial visual impact: Ukrainian native Valery Lamakh (1925–1978), best remembered today for his decorative tilework on Kiev’s many Stalin-era residential buildings, and Israeli muralist Shlomo Eliraz (1912–1994), whose name today primarily survives in a handful of public artworks scattered around Herzliya and Tel Aviv. Lamakh is the subject of Daucikova’s elegiac video installation Along the Axis of Affinity (2015); Eliraz’s oeuvre is the centerpiece of Evron’s large-scale, site-specific photo work, itself part of a larger inquiry into the lost utopia of 1970s urbanism. In revisiting the legacies of these forgotten heroes of a certain avant-garde’s last stand, Daucikova’s video and Evron’s photo-mural revisit the trials and tribulations of the public art complex at a time of dwindling opportunities for artistic thinking on an architectural scale.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete