Michal Helfman worked at Outset Bialik Residency studio for four months in 2020, producing new works towards the show Dear A.S.A/P (2019-2020).
A sense of ongoing political, economic and ecological instability accompanies our time and is reflected in actual events. The question of the position of the artistic act in relation to time was embodied in Michal Helfman’s new work Dear A.S.A/P (2019-2020) and reflected the way in which the artwork aspires to express changing immediate reality.
Helfman presents the evading attempts of the artistic act in border zones set in constant change, from past, present and future. She does this by creating abandoned and haunted spaces reminiscent of border checkpoints, detention facilities, or alternatively, the backstage areas of the theatre and the museum. The exhibition space is entered by two separate entrees leading to two different spaces. One has the title Time, the other, Show. This splitting of the phrase Showtime indicates the two axes at the base of the exhibition: one tends to time (the process of history, the present and the future), the other to the act of display and performance (the human and the artistic).
At the centre of the exhibition, Dear A.S.A/P (2019-2020) was a video installation that imagined a reality in which art is denied the ability to move and act freely. In 2019 Michal Helfman formed the group Edition of X, which seeks to mediate between artists whose freedom of movement is limited and artistic institutions and audiences. The group consists of various performers who create new interpretations for the artwork they were assigned. This conveying mechanism, called connective, indicates reciprocal relations and the need for human connections in the art field and beyond to generate action and transformation.
