Koby Levy
5/07

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An accomplished graphic artist and a graduate of The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design MFA program, Levy creates installations that use materials from peripheral and esoteric web sites. His work explores our expectations of and relationship to the internet and technology. It allows us to reflect on how we extract information from the net and how our world is influenced by its visuals, data and pace. One of his thought-provoking installations is a phonograph record with a spiral image that is generally used in hypnosis. As we watch the record turn, we hear music which appears to be coming from the phonograph, but is actually an internet recording. Levy intertwines our nostalgia for the past with our advanced technologies; his seemingly simple work offers a sophisticated view of the complexity of our situation.
All Earth

Shown in the exhibition Passer By
Artists' Studios gallery space, Tel Aviv, May 2007
La Capella Gallery, Barcelona, September 2007

Levy was one of two Israeli artists chosen by Barcelona curator Marti Peran  for an exchange program with the JCVA. He stayed in Barcelona during September, 2006, short on the heels of fellow Israeli artist  Doron Rabina.  The work he made was shown in the exhibition Passer By in Tel Aviv in May 2007; the show included works by Rabina as well as Barcelonian artists Domenec and Daniel Chust. It opens in Barcelona in the La Capella Gallery in September 2007.

Levy's installation is composed of three plasma screens, a turned-over boat, an upside-down, broken mirror reminiscent of an eye, and pamphlets designed for an African church in Tel Aviv. As Barcelona curator Marti Peran has written, "it is a collection of moments, landscapes, meetings and events that can be strung together only with difficulty."

The work traces both Levy's journey from Spain's Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic Ocean, and a mental and emotional journey from Levy's own home, through a community of Africans in Tel Aviv, to immigrants in Spain.

Levy opens his Barcelona journey with photographs of the priest of Tel Aviv's African parish. In Spain, he films a series of disconnected events (students on a trip, migrating flocks of birds, tourists, immigrants with no visas) that offer associations with migration.  His final video work recapitulates watching video clips in a Nigerian prostitute's room, and reminds one of the organ chords heard in Tel Aviv. The immigrants depicted may have wished for a better world when they followed the promise of their religious faith, but they found no redemption, and wound up rolling in the gutter, faintly serenaded by hope.