Yechiel Shemi regarded the term “Spiritual Risk” - or Risiko - as a guiding principle and a mental state, in which art-making is reevaluated each day anew. According to Shemi, each visit to his Atelier is an incessant experiment, in search of something primal. It is walking towards and around the edge - on the verge of the abyss. 

The exhibition “Risiko” by Ron Asulin and Shay Yechezkeli at Atelier Shemi echoes this spiritual risk into a somewhat open echo chamber of contemporary, multidisciplinary art. The works transform universal abstract values, and the formalism associated with innovation, into intimate and everyday objects. Unlike work in the socialist sense, as a modernist value, evident in Shemi’s vocabulary, here it’s part of the market mechanism, part of a trade, of income and expenses. The works attempt to create metamorphosis of inferior objects - cheap materials or byproducts which fulfilled their function fully - into a modernist sublimity.

This exhibition grapples with the borderline criminal act, and with what appears on the surface to be normative but in fact conceals the intention to legitimize shady bargains. The works seem to belong to a corridor of a forsaken office building, and comes across as failed trickery: the inner space of the lift was flattened into a two-dimensional relief, and the curtain designed to block the view in fact embodies it. A system of mistrust is therefore created in the space, immersing it and becoming intertwined with it, by means of the display devices responsible for the crime: the head is strangled in a violent embrace with the shelf holder, while the magnetic hangers fixing the drawings to the wall join in the spinning of the roulette. Together, the works portray the appearance of a mundane, buttoned-up office, suppressing a violence ready to manifest at the moment the contract is breached. The pieces in the exhibition generate a contradictory relationship of rhetoric and content; between the banal device of display and the familiar design of office furniture and between the scam concealed within them, between the buttoned shirt and the sweaty tank top underneath it.

The slang term ‘Khoshmantush’ derives from the phrase “Rekhuse Natush”, which translates from Hebrew to ‘abandoned property’. Mantush is the Arabic word for ‘detached’. Together, these words phonetically resemble “kusch mein tusch”, which is Yiddish for “kiss my ass”. Avot Yeshurun, an Israeli Poet, used the phase to express the Israeli establishment’s attitude towards Palestinian property abandoned after the war of 1948. 
I was exposed to the poetry of Yeshurun through my encounter with my family story, which was the starting point of this exhibition: Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, my family, recent immigrants from Morocco, received from the state keys to an abandoned house in Jaffa in which they lived in their first years in Israel. During one of their first days in the house, my grandfather wished to plant a tree in the garden. As he was digging, he discovered a large barrel hidden in the ground, which seemed to have been buried recently. The barrel contained a vast array of valuables: housewares, bedsheets, tablecloths, and other precious ornaments. The new owners found an appropriate use for each of the items found in the loot. The sheets, beautifully decorated with embroidered peacocks, were turned into the walls of my family's Sukkah. A Japanese set of porcelain tableware was used for special occasions. Of all the contents of the barrel, only two teacups from the Japanese porcelain set survived. They were left in my grandmother’s possession, and I inherited them this year, following her passing.  This work was first presented in my graduate exhibition in Bezalel. The installation was created out of the storage systems and the remnants of material within the workshop which also served as the exhibition space. The installation intended to evoke the moment of the discovery of the barrel and transfer it into the workshop of Bezalel. The video work accompanying it scans the ‘Root Research Laboratory” in Tel-Aviv University, documenting the man in charge of maintaining it since it stopped functioning as a site for experiments.

The works in the exhibit were created from the encounter with three-dimensional tattoos, which conceptualize exposed and wounded areas of the body. They respond to the same guiding logic of those tattoos, which affirms that in order to uncover what lies beneath, the above layer should be concealed.

This installation is a cross-section of the enclosed balcony wall in my grandmother’s house: the window shutters on the outside and the wall on the inside. From the balcony wall which acts as an echo chamber, my grandmother’s voice can be heard, inviting the viewer to put his ear to the wall and listen. She is complaining about her housekeeper, Irene, who lives in the enclosed balcony. That year, Irene stayed in Israel without a work permit, and issuing her an authorization depended on her devoted work to my grandmother. The illegality of Irene’s employment, which needed to be physically concealed with the strange structural cover-up, made the balcony an ideal hiding spot for my grandmother.