Alona Rodeh. Architecture of the Nights

Alona Rodeh. Architecture of the Nights
March 16 to June 10, 2019

Opening on Friday, March 15, 7 pm
Press conference: Thursday, March 14, 2019, 2 pm

Light, movement, and sound: In her room-spanning, performative installations the artist Alona Rodeh (*1979 in Tel Aviv, Israel) translates the nocturnal design of our cities into aesthetic spaces of experience. With Architecture of the Nights the Kunstpalais hosts her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Based on the term “Architecture of the Night”, coined by US-architect Raymond Hood in 1930, Rodeh develops her artistic approach to urban illumination. This approach is grounded both on a careful examination of technical components as well as in-depth cultural-historic research on the use of artificial light.

Rodeh studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, at the Royal College of Art in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In the past years she received numerous scholarships, including a grant for an artist-in-residency-project funded by ZK/U in Berlin and Artecitya, during which Rodeh lived and worked in various Berlin fire stations – 24/7 for nine months. The video work To The Moon And Back, partially produced in the course of this project, is now on display in her Kunstpalais show.

Rodeh’s art as a whole is fueled by her particular interest in the qualities of materials and objects that shape our visual environment – sometimes subtle and almost hidden, sometimes glaring and calling for attention. Often those are items in which aspects of security and visibility overlap. Fluorescent colors and reflective gear played and still play a central role in her works. In her latest productions LED-elements, programmed for subtle choreographies by the artist, take center stage as new protagonists in her “performances without performers”. As a result installations emerge, monolithic and filigree at once, that lead a luminescent life of their own filling the Kunstpalais’ dark vaults with enigmatic presence.

A substantial exhibition catalog accompanying the solo show takes up the theoretical threads of her project, along with documenting the artist’s new works. Safe and Sound: The Third Dimension is the third in Rodeh’s ongoing series of artist publications. Its title recalls a quote by the Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy, who in the early 20th century dreamed of mechanical apparatuses that via a multitude of flash and color effects could compose large-scale light structures in midair. Alona Rodeh draws from this rich legacy and conveys it into contemporary circumstances.

The artist:
Born in 1979 in Tel Aviv, Israel lives and works in Berlin

Solo shows (selection):
2019 DARK AGES 2020, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, AT
2018 I Wear My Sunglasses At Night, Bivy, Anchorage, Alaska, US
2017 The Runner (LIVE), KOENIG2 by_robbygreif, Wien, AT
2017 Safe and Sound Selection: Frontal Encounters, MiArt Art, Miland, IT
2016 The Chase, Vesselroom Project, Berlin, DE
2015 Safe and Sound (Evolutions), Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, IL
2014 Safe and Sound I, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, DE

Group shows (selection):
2018 To the Moon and Back, Berlin Independent Film Festival, Berlin, DE 2017 Modular Architecture of Relations, ZK/U Berlin, Berlin, DE
2016 The Analogy Between Bulbs and Buds – A Sculpture Garden, Botanischer Volkspark, Berlin, DE
2015 Emergency Measures, Dallas Power Station, Dallas, US 2014 Chicago Triangle, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, IL

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist publication, edited by Amely Deiss and Malte Kröger.
Texts by Amely Deiss and Malte Kröger as well as Pol Esteve, Séamus Kealy, Marc Wiggam and a visual essay by Alona Rodeh.
The catalog will be published in April 2019.
The catalog will be presented during an artist talk on Sunday, May 19, 2 pm at Kunstpalais.