A Mythology of the Contemporary
An Interview with Ulli Knall and Patricia Ellis, Curators of the Exhibition I Hate You In June
Guy Bar Amotz
As soon as you enter the website www.ihateyouinjune.com, you realize something else is going on here. In a text decorated with flower decorations, the curators of I Hate You In June present themselves as schlock TV junkies, historical biography addicts and celebrity devotees. They say it is a concept exhibition and a constantly updated soap opera. The curators are Ulli Knall, a London-based curator and sculptor famous for her ceramic water fountains, and Patricia Ellis, a trendy, controversial painter and art critic.
The list of artists participating in the project makes it clear to anyone familiar with the Anglo-European art scene, that this isn’t just another claptrap website, but rather a serious project. Despite their natural fascination with the low and banal, the curators chose to work with the scene’s more elitist margins. This month, as Galia Bar-Or downloads the website onto the floor of the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, we’ll all get a chance to see if and how
David Burrows’ portrait photographs interact with the video pieces by theater director Janette Parris. Many pairs will also be presented: Bob & Roberta Smith, Vladimir Dubosarsky & Alexander Vinogradov, Markus Muntean & Adi Rosenblum. There will also be a fair share of melancholy, loneliness and youthful blues: Gil Shani, Alex Yudzon, Geerten Verheus, as well as the victorious joy of false maturation. The curators take it for granted that trend and style are legitimate tools for confronting the everyday, even if the horrifying everyday seems out of sync with all this merriment. In their post-simulacric space, tragedies and collective disasters blend with the private and personal to generate the fantastic bubble of a higher life style and identity. “Artists’ life” - that ever-so-influential decadent myth (Picasso, Warhol, openings, parties) is still keeping up with the times, continuing to evolve, and the impact of globalization and virtual reality makes it more accessible than ever. It really doesn’t matter whether the catastrophe is in the flooded streets of south London, in Latin Los Angeles, in Jaffa, Nazareth, the Occupied Territories or Ein Harod — as long as you can run away and re-invent yourself via that super-power called art.
