Hinges and Nails'- Actions in Space Adi Sened

Adi Sened

Adi Sened, who is known mainly as an urban artist, presents actions in the space of the gallery and around it, including painting, sculpture, installation, architectural references, movement and motion, and for the first time in his work – animation.

Sened maintains complex relationships with the "hill" ("giv'a" in Hebrew); Givat Hashlosha, the kibbutz where he was born and which his family left in his early childhood, and Givat Haviva, a conceptual, research and educational campus which is home to the Collaborative Art Center and the Peace Gallery. Sened was active around our hill last October as part of Under the Streetlamp, the two-day arts festival. His marks are still on the ground, in small scale, and they are unexpectedly revealed to those who walk around the campus.

Much of his activities take place in public spaces, but not all. He operates on the edge, between the borderlines, in the gray areas between public and private, between protest and the establishment and between the mainstream and the marginal. For him, what appears to be marginal is actually mainstream, and vice versa.

He moves between fields and materials just as he moves in his actions, on one axis of movement, with a central attitude to what is there. The work is almost never born in a vacuum (if there is such a thing). In the beginning, there was the place, and it is that existence that motivated him to action.

The action that is created usually looks for the minimum required (although Sened cannot be defined as minimalist). Its subsequent development extends beyond Sened himself, it is erased or changed, being exposed in public. Sometimes it is a catalyst for other or less artistic activities. Somewhere along the way, there was vandalism as reaction to Sened's work, a familiar phenomenon in urban art. Sometimes Sened responds back, paints over, or even vandalizes his own work.

"Hinges and Nails" presents Sened in his wide range, his various types of movements in space and time. With both stiff and flowing movements, one can see his Sisyphean principles and stubbornness, along with delicacy and intimacy that attest to such sensitivity that they sometimes appear to be at the edges as exposed (or amputated) nerve cords.

It is also the dialogue between male and female that operates within him in the techniques in which he employs, in his handling of the space and in the content of the never-ending relationship between man and woman or that most basic relationship between something and something else.

The 'Kufsonim' ("box-people"), characters that Sened has been developing for almost two decades, a controlled doodling, beginning with the abstraction of a square from an envelope and transformed into figures, variations and worlds, are presented here alongside a personal ceramic sculpture with an initial but mature look; Polished, filled with internal spaces and "places" to stop for a moment. They complete his drawings that scratch the bare layers. Among them, there are Dadaistic environments. It is sculpture that has readymade elements, but here, too, Sened allows himself the freedom to move independently of the (artificial) division between ready and manipulated, something in which an intervention was made or that which is created from nothing.The architectural perspective is at Sened's starting point, and in comparison, these works are small-scale environments. Although we are not accustomed to treating them as environments on such a scale, they were, in fact, created as such.

The street, the protest and the possible occurrence are areas where he identifies the same borderline that he extends to a place, a domain, a gray area perhaps. It started with marking the tents which were part of the 2011 social protest in Rothschild Blvd. (something similar is currently taking place right there, once again!) and continues to "the creation of places" in his ceramic sculptures. 

These places have identifiable signs that cannot be ignored, like saddles or living creatures with legs and tail marks, or maybe aliens. The bowls with their mouths wide open, the birds or the nests, which offer a place or a space to be in, to rest upon or to shout with. 

The 'kufsonim', the "box-people", reflect, among other things, criticism of the influence of the culture of Americanization that Israel has adopted for years. Through the characters of superheroes and cultural heroes, we also discover the many masks that we adopted as a society and as individuals.

The 'kufsonim', with their shortcomings and disabilities are you, me, and us. At the same time, the works harbor an intimacy. The small scale forces the viewer to come closer and creates the first relationships in the hierarchy between the artist and the viewer.

Sened's urban art is a physical activity, intensive, requiring agility, sometimes climbing or squeezing through. Between the speed when stenciling on the street and the slowness of polishing the clay, there is a desire within the movement to find a place, a nest, a relationship, a local identity, a society with ethics and social aesthetics, and to maintain its complexity in its own social, cultural and artistic sense.

Underlying his aspirations is "the aspiration for change and cultural development, in the dimension of time, which is based on the freedom of the spirit, the thought and criticism as a condition for achievement." (In Curbstones and Code, Sened 2013).

Adi Sened is an artist in motion who creates in movement, space, street, time and development. 

Sened, in my opinion, catches reality and works with the fantasy that attests to reality, and draws us through laughter and earnestness to a gaze that seeks to understand and heal. Understanding is a healing that he and perhaps others need.

He is preoccupied with the many short and rapid actions that create the long term, which seeks to create social ethics. "Touches in the public sphere, which create reality, and not just an image, a dada of the subconscious." Adi Sened

This is a key to understanding him, the same accidental connection that is not accidental at all, which creates relationships and layers of meaning into contemporary discourse, the Israeli art scene and the history of art; which does not attach too much importance to creative action but includes what has already been done in an effort to add as little as possible in order to influence as much as possible.   

Anat Lidror

Curator