Where's The Exit?

EDITION

2023, Shortlisted

school

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel

links

@bnasht

In the project, which spanned two and a half years, I wandered and documented the central station in Tel Aviv. For me, The architecture of the station is parallel to the structure of the soul and I divide it into two: Visible planes, familiar layers, perceived as conscious. These are the floors of the shopping malls and the bus lines, where there are discounted clothes, foreign workers with their patients, the Filipino market with the smells of unfamiliar dishes, tired soldiers on the way to the base or home. On the other hand, plains are hidden from view. Floors where activity was shut down with closed shops. A cinema that once screened films of a pornographic nature and today is a fetish club. Dark corridors where prostitutes meet their customers. Empty parking lots with severe addicts seeking refuge for their souls and men in the closet looking for a sexual outlet and then returning to their homes, their wives, the village or the synagogue. These correspond to the parts of the mind and the repressed memories locked away and hidden in the subconscious. In the encounters with the people and the spaces, I am confronted with relationships of desire and disgust i find in me. Desire, which seeks to meet here and now with repressed pain and violence, but also with the possibility of finding home and love. Disgust, which seeks to disable pain along with the emotional mechanism, to escape masochism and quiet the unconscious layers. More than once the destruction of the station was talked about, as if it was the source from which all the evil in society stems. In this work I offer a complex point of view that gives the station the opportunity to be what it is. last stop or first stop; A terrifying concrete monster or a complicated and comforting city of refuge. The central station 2019-2022