Curator Doreet LeVitte Harten was a guest of the Outset Bialik Residency in April 2016. During her residency LeVitte Harten curated and prepared the group exhibition Things To Come at Petach Tikva Museum of Art.
Science fiction is a relative new field that deals with the impact of imagined science and technology upon society and individuals. It is a controlled way to think and dream about the future, which at the same time reflects the values of the culture in which it is produced. It is through science fiction that existing social desires, cultural aspirations, and political and technological patterns manifest themselves. The imagined vision of the future speaks volumes about the present, and is always also anchored in the past.
This show aims to define the speculative fiction in its visual modus and to point towards its historical context. It brings together and conflates different parameters without differentiating between so called high art and popular expression. In a way, science fiction can be defined as the modern imagination and the works of the artists presented here testify to this fact.
What fuses art with science fiction is the ability to look at things unseen. In the sense that a good portrait, for example, is not a mirror image of a given person but a quest for deciphering, evoking a certain truth which is then shared by the artist and the observer. While art’s journey is perceived as a vertical dive into a truth that lies beneath the surface, it is the surface itself that science fiction uses as the plateaux of its discoveries. At the center of that rhizomatic plain stand the permutations, variations, and mutations, or in short – the state of things to come.
Doreet LeVitte Harten teaches, writes and organises exhibitions. Among the shows she has put together is Raffi Lavi’s retrospective at the Israeli Pavilion of the Venice Bienniale (2009), The New Hebrews: 100 Years of Art in Israel at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2005) and About Stupidity at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art (2012). In 2013 LeVitte Harten was among the founders of Circle1, a platform for art and culture in Berlin.
Participating artists: Alexander Schlesier, Avinoam Sternheim, Christopher O’Leary, Dov Or Ner, Eitan Ben Moshe, Eli Gur Arie, Eran May-Raz & Daniel Lazo, Giorgia Lupi, Jakub Nepras, John Coulthart, Jonathan Gold, Jonathan Goldman, Karen Russo, Karl Hans Janke, Lihi Turjeman, Michelle Jezierski, Moshe Elnatan, Netaly Aylon, Peleg Dishon, Robert Martens, Robert Stieghorst, Sasha Serber, Shahar Marcus, Shay Id Alony, Till Nowak, Universal Everything, Yael Bartana and Yuval Litani.