David Horvitz & Ali Eyal
A new garden from old wounds
ChertLüdde / Potsdamer Straße 97, Berlin
11 September – 9 November 2024

In their two-person exhibition A new garden from old wounds (from a line in Maria Sledmere’s poem Deciduous), artists Ali Eyal and David Horvitz explore geographic and conceptual distances, delve into the boundaries of memories and emotions, and investigate how fragmentary elements can come together to form a new reality.

At the entrance, David Horvitz’s work A Clock whose Seconds are Synchronized with Your Heartbeat invites the viewer to sense another temporality, while next to it, the large-scale painting You need to go back to page number ‘13’ to not understand anything, and, by Ali Eyal resonates with a fragmented, unfinished rhythm.

In the center of the painting, a woman’s hair unfurls, revealing a series of images that depict a journey. Several figures appear, and a character arises within a rupture. Each personality becomes a detail, a part, a segment. They gather together with objects that frequently reoccur in Eyal’s paintings: bright bulbs, desks and aerial views of a farm or forest. All stem from the artist’s childhood memories of running his fingers through his mother’s hair while falling asleep. The stories Eyal reproduces involve the recollection of everyday objects as fulcrums of life and memories, portraying scenes in which characters blend with a background that incorporates their rememberings.

Also in remembrance, Horvitz’s vases were made from glass fragments collected by the artist’s friends near Almstadtstrasse in Berlin. This street was formerly called Grenadierstrasse, and it was there that the artist’s grandmother, Irma, was born on December 22, 1906. Irma lived in what was once a Jewish area of Berlin before immigrating to America aboard a steamship in 1913. Shards of broken glass that littered the streets of Berlin, covering the surface of different histories, trace where Irma might have walked and where her presence has lingered for over a century.

Scattered on the walls are texts from the ongoing series Nostalgia, in which Horvitz permanently erases digital photos from his archive, and replaces them with text descriptions of the scenes originally photographed. We are called upon to use our imagination to recreate these memories and find the image carried by the artist’s storytelling.

Vanishing on the screen located on the mezzanine, are the words California and “كاليفورنيا” (the state’s name in Arabic) which are being written in sand. The etymology of this name is significant, not only because both artists are based there, but because California comes from the Arabic language via Spanish. A collaboration between Horvitz and Eyal, recorded by Samar Al Summary, the film captures the moment when both artists inscribed these words on a beach in Los Angeles. As the waves wash over the sand, the writing gradually fades away, symbolizing how divisions of place and discourse are inexorably erased by the landscape itself. 

Amidst artworks concealed within furniture, poetry and photographs tucked away in drawers, sand sealed in glass marbles and carried in pockets, a fragmented self-portrait and countless other subtle details, the exhibition concludes in an exploration of absence, embracing the unexpected and the undefined.

Biographies

Ali Eyal (b. 1994) is an artist working with painting, drawing and video to explore the relationships between personal history, transitory memories, politics and identity. In 2023, Eyal is was featured in Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah (2023). Eyal’s solo exhibitions include In the Head’s Sunrise, Brief Histories, New York (2023); In the Head’s Dusk, SAW Gallery, Ottawa (2023). Recent group exhibitions include, Is It Morning for You Yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2023); Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine, Chicago Cultural Center (2023); Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, MoMA PS1, New York (2020); How to Reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2019). Eyal’s video work is included in the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil: Memory is an Edition Station, São Paulo (2023); Rencontres Internationales, Paris; VITRINE x Kino Screenings, London; Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah Art Foundation; and Cairo Video Festival, Medrar, Cairo. His works are in the collection of Kadist, Paris; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Eyal earned an undergraduate degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad (2015), he currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

David Horvitz studied at the University of California and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. He obtained a MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, in 2010.

Witty and poetic, the work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks. Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works– in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services– our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.

His work was exhibited in venues such as: High Line Art, New York; MoMA, New York; New Museum, New York; SF MOMA, San Francisco; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HangarBicocca, Milan; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Albertinum, SDK, Dresden; Wende Museum, Los Angeles; La Criée centre d’art contemporaine, Rennes; S.M.A.K, Gent; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musée d’Art Contemporain Avignon; Crac Alsace, Altkirsch; Brooklyn Museum, among others.