Pnina Grietzer: Seventy Aspects of Kafka's Castle
Chief Curator: Rachel Sukman
Exhibition Curator: Hana Kofler
In the heart of Tel Aviv stands a “ castle, ” a castle without an address.
A photograph portraying a group of buildings as seen from the window of Pnina Grietzer ' s apartment generates an illusion of a castle, captured on an iPhone 6 camera. A cluster of photographs, simulating a real object: a tall, towering castle, indifferent to the gaze cast upon it and the longing to enter its gates. Some of the photographs are abstract in essence, depicting disintegration, fracture, shattering. With their adorning beauty, they convey the illusion that one can hold onto the transient, the changing, and the fleeting.
The castle is photographed throughout the year, on days of light and dark nights. In fact, the printed images are a symbolic representation of an inner world, which spawns splendor and evokes the longing for sense and meaning.
Franz Kafka ' s two monumental novels, The Trial and The Castle , constitute the “ Kafkaesque world, ” a world that has become a universal symbol, replete with nightmares, misunderstandings, alienation, emptiness, and solitude; a world oscillating between the letter of the law and the lack of grace; a world in which the obtuseness of bureaucratic rule, as described in books published in the 1920s, is valid to this day.
During a lifetime of waiting, K. (Kafka ' s land surveyor) weaves fantasies and fosters a deep yearning to enter the castle gates. The castle, towering in the distance, stands for a frustrating, inaccessible governmental authority entrusted with the lives of subjects who are helpless vis- à -vis its power and injustice.
A six-minute video work, Ever Waiting, was also filmed by Grietzer with an iPhone 6 camera. The film places the castle in a real setting, outside the artist ' s window in the heart of Tel Aviv. All year round, she looks at the castle, which symbolizes the ever so lacking grace, for which we perpetually pine.
Pnina Grietzer, a documentary filmmaker, photographer, painter, writer of poetry, prose and children ' s stories, was born in Poland in 1953; lives and works in Tel Aviv and Berlin. Graduate of the History Department, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Studied at the Camera Obscura School of Art, Tel Aviv. In 2016, she presented a solo exhibition, “ At the Haven of the Sea ” (Lehofyamim), at the Florentine Quartet, Tel Aviv, spanning oil paintings based on Jewish rabbinic literature .
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