Setareh Maghsoudi created MoMo, a Mobile Mosque, a space to pray. The inspiring beauty of it made me stay inside and just enjoy the structure. In this piece Maghsoudi succeeded not only to “built” a modest and simple space, she succeeded to create with origami the repetitive decoration you can find in Mosques as part of the building structure.

​First I was trying to understand the scale of the objects . Then I discovered that there is no horizon line, which could place the objects where they were photographed. The artist Oran Hoffmann combined together with this work a print of  Josef Albers, which takes it one step further. His  floating white forms, without any scale or horizon, became, like Oran's work, an abstract.

Tel Aviv is a city with many good artists creating a lot of intriguing art and having so few places to show. With such shortage of spaces, a cafe can be a good place to expose your art. I entered into one of these cafés and I saw this work of ceramics hanging on its wall. without any name nor any description. Sometimes what was presented simply can look the best.

 Although this beautiful piece of the artist Gijs Bakker is shown in a vitrine as a jewel , I think the artist wanted to point out something else . Here, outstretched on a golden circle, Adam , without god, seems to be in an erotic position, raising his hand to invite  someone to make love.  

We don’t know exactly how did Joseph Beuys explain pictures to a dead hare. When I saw these works of Hanny van den Brand I was wandering what Beuys would explain to these hares, who clearly  cannot hear anymore. The image of Beuys walking with the dead hare in his hand reminded me van den Brand’s other work : pieta, also here, like some other works of  Joseph Beuys, van den Brand's works are intriguing and repulsive in same time.

My first impression was that the artist, Paul van der Eerden, wanted to mislead us. By simpleness  he created this half childish half mask. But after this first impression disappeared, I realize that I’m looking in the face of gloomy clown who might lose his crown.

Last Saturday, after I visited many Amsterdam galleries, I found myself in the Akinci gallery raising my head to this work. Stéphanie Saadé build this beautiful lamp, the upper part is a broken chandelier which cannot light anymore and glass tears are still hanging around as a remembrance of better times. Below, hanged a plum energy saving lamp which blinded me long after I left.

I stood in the space, surrounded by the work of Rob Sweere. I got the feeling that this peculiar landscape will continue to swell till it will swallow me. Monotonous sound that accompanies the work adds to the feeling of visiting an alien site, that comes from the very distant past or from an approaching future.

Walking through the exhibition “Curiosity” made me realize that understanding nature is the main reason for curiosity . A long the centuries man tried to analyze and at the same time to change what he found in the nature.  This work of Thomas Grünfeld made me smile and at the same time terrified – how far we can go with changing the nature?

Jef Stapel creates an imaginary landscape from ready-made pieces. Not only is it a good composition, he also succeeded in creating a double point of view.  One minute you think you see the horizon in this work and in the next minute it looks like a topography vista from above.

I couldn’t walk around this work, a wall was limiting the walk and I could look at it only from tree sides. I’m almost sure it was Antonis Pittas, and  this artist intention. While walking around, the balance between the colors, the lines changes and the shapes integrate in a  fascinating way. Pittas created with these minimal lines a rich work .

As you can find in the prints of Piranesi, maybe, but only maybe,  in distance of 2000 years, ruins look romantic.

Somewhere in the mountains, sometime between the forth dish and the fifth, Martin, the restaurant owner put a catalog on our table. "These are all my fathers’ paintings" he told us. The abstracts, like this one, where the most beautiful works in the catalog of Jean-Paul Barray. Something between Feininger's construction of forms and Cézanne's decomposition of shapes.

I saw this preformance while visiting Rietveld Academy during the open day. Like in the past, Jessie Hoefnagel was sitting, knitting and telling a story. Knitting was in the past a chance to tell stories, life stories or fictional. Here it looks like an endless one.

I see a series of big black and white photographs. In some of them the black changed gradually to brown. The lines of the folding are very clear and give the feeling like someone just took it out from the drawer to show us. Only in this case, it seems like, the photographs were stored with a lot of scrap. Looking carefully to the details of Anton Heyboer’s work and after reading about him, you realize how the photographs reflect the chaos of his way of life.

Looking at the work of Paul Kooiker convinced me finally what I suspected earlier: Eve was not banished out from Eden, she left because it was too small for her.

For more than three years I follow my FB rules: to write only about art works that I saw myself in public places and it’s available to everyone to see. This one is  exceptional, Jack Jano send it as a comment and I found it so beautiful that I decided to break my rules. I don’t know where it is hanging and I didn’t see it myself. Anyhow, it made me realize how complicated home can be.

Amongst other things, the work of Kristof Kintera reminded me the Encyclopedic Palace of Marino Auriti, a building which planed to contain the world's knowledge! The model of this idea was the central piece of the Venice Biënnale 2013. This book tower of Kintera, like the utopian dream of Auriti, strives to contain and represent the world's knowledge in its entirety. How naïve we are!

A beautiful combination of  “ small paper napkins object made while the artist was listening to audio museum guides” installed in the space together with big “papier-mâché sculptures taken shapes from amateur sculpture books”  done by Ana Navas. It seems  the artist concentrated in this installation on the margins, literally.  She works with left- overs and waste and relates to the creativity of anonymous people.

Don't let the beauty of the colorful composition mislead you. It is not one of those earth art works done in the desert. On the contrary, it is waste manufactured by  consumers who left the empty barrels after they found a new way to get oil.  This aerial photo of the Saudi Arabia desert, was taken by Ahmed Mater, exposing the hypocrisy of civilization.

Jerusalem beyond and above mentioned in the diaries of Mark Twain.  In these diaries  which he wrote during his trip to the holy land, the Jerusalem he imagined was totally different from what he found. He dreamed about a spiritual, picturesque city, a center of inspiration. What he found was a crowded city with stuffy, bare alleys and beggars from all over the world in every corner. I was thinking about this phrase, about the difference between Jerusalem beyond and above, when I saw the work of Masha Trebukova. In these days it seems the differences became bigger and Jerusalem above became even more dark.

Special for Liberation Day, 5th May 2014. In the exhibition Apartheid & After, I found this blowup pages of the Gazette of South Africa, in English and in Afrikaans, the strongest image of the broad exhibition. I copied its label: Apartheid Group Area Proclamation in the South African Government Gazette of 27 October 1961. Pages 10,11,12 and 13 describe in detail the area reserved for occupation by Whites in the town of Boksburg (South Africa). Page 14 describes in detail the area reserved for occupation by Coloureds  in the town of Boksburg.

I was standing astonished under Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceiling with frescoes in the former ballroom, the main room of this museum of city history.  Tiepolo painted them in celebration of the marriage between Ludovico Rezzonico and Faustina Savorgnan. Looking at these frescoes made me for a moment believe in heaven:  it looked like the ceiling opened to the sky and this was my chance to have a glance at heaven.  

Rayyane Tabet located his  `Fossils`` on a roof of a building in Amman. These eight  cement suitcases contains  personal objects of the artist. The suitcases preserve and  protect the objects  and on the same time they made the objects invisible and unreachable. What  attract my attention is the fact that all the shutters of the widows in this photo are closed.  Maybe the houses are the same like the cement suitcases, preserve and  protect the people inside and at the same time make the city residents  invisible and unreachable.

Walking through the exhibition of Maayan Elyakim gave me a feeling like I’m walking in a chapel and being part in a ceremony: some of her objects I had to encircle a few times and with others  I had to stand motionless. This one looked like a new version of a goddess waiting for me to sacrifice something or at least to bow for  her.

After I saw the work of Michael Gitlin, I went to check if there is Haiku in visual art. I still don’t know but if it does, this work is Haiku.

I walked around the building about 40 min looking for the entrance:  from the street the building looks like any other building which is going to be demolished soon: broken glass, half falling walls and dark squares instead of windows. Nothing alludes to what you get inside: the moment  I stepped inside I was surrounded by these layers of waste and leftover materials, laying precisely in balance one on the other, turning in curves and creating what can be walls and columns at the same time.  For a moment it looks like geometric tumors coming out from the ruined walls going to “swallow “  it all.
Or maybe, like in the film:  Being John Malkovich, it was just a visit in the head of Marjan Teeuwen, the artist who created this total fantastic experience.

Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, de Volkskrant Beelde Kunst Prijs. In this relief of Emmeline de Mooij the heads are the protagonists. Is dialog possible at all between these people? Or maybe, de Mooij is telling us here, that talks between people are mostlly monologues, when each one is busy with his\her own world. Maybe they need cellular phones to communicate with each other.

Driven by his curiosity how life looked like in small communities in the past,  Jan Brykczynski  traveled to Boiko in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains.  As he said : “..the place where my idea about idyllic rural life materialized. “ Brykczynski  didn’t look for the exotic , he looked for evidence that would prove what he had  heard and imagine such places. For me it seems that he found what he was looking for. The artist created a series of works consisting of landscape fragments which give a colorful picture about life in small communities in the past.

A beautiful work of William Klein from the ’50.  Influenced by different abstract artists on that time, he captured places which became abstract works. Here I could see how he was busy with form and lines, as was written in the exhibition text: from this stage, Klein had discovered photography as an artistic medium. A discovery of which one can see the impact in his non narrative short films.

If there was a prize category for the best "booth art installation", I’m sure this one should get it: Maleonn, the artist, built a site specific installation, called Portrait of a Stranger in Time, 2014. In the depth of the booth space he build a totem made of old broken clocks, decorated with cheap plastic chains and old photos. When you are pulled into the booth, as it definitely does, you will find yourself surrounded with many small, old passport photos of anonymous people which the artist collected over the years. By hanging them next to each other, he created a different time line of memories.

I was sitting in the living room of and with the artist Menashe Kadishman, surrounded by his works from different periods. This work attracted my eye: It is a silhouette of woman giving birth, cut out from a metal board. Her hand, out of proportion, raised up like stopped in the middle of a movement. Seems like this hand expresses the moment of creativity, of giving birth and giving life: the woman who gives life to the baby and the artist who "gives" life to the metal board.

Lena Soulkovskaia told me how she is fascinate by jumping: the decision about the right moment to jump, the concentration on the face, the time in the air and in the end, diving in the water. Looking at her work, I could see it all on the face of this one. Lena, coming from classical art education, seems to have the knowledge to formulate her thoughts into an image.

Following the phrase  ’ If walls could speak’,  the artists Machteld Aardse & Femke Kempkes choose to screen last written words on the wall of De Hollandsche Schouwburg. The words became a source of light in the dark, literally. These words come from letters people send to their relatives during the war when they realized they might not come back from the destination they were send to. In this way the artists made the walls speak and tell what was years away from the public eyes.