Michal Halfam: Art, Humanism and ResistanceMichal
 Halfam, “Running Out of History”, Sommer Contemporay Art, January 3 to March 23, 2019.

Master of installation, photography and video, Michal Halfam proposes – among others in this exhibition – the one that gives it its title. It is based on the artist’s meeting with Gal Luski, founder and director of the humanitarian organisation “Israeli Flying Aid”.

For the last 7 years Luski and his volunteers have been operating in Syria to bring help to those who were totally deprived of it even by the United Nations because of their resistance to the official government.

Helfman was interested in Luski’s work as a “smuggler”. This was for him the tactic that seemed common to art. Namely, how to find a way through political discourses and accepted consensus in order to insert a content that rises up against various types of silence, refusal and chaos.

His goal was to learn and use the militant counter-smuggling mechanisms that Luski demonstrates. He found there a lever for the exploitation of the same principle in art where it is a priori more difficult to grasp and quantify.

In this exhibition there is a superb set of mirrors. Everything responds to reality and its problems with formal perfection. The reality of the humanitarian organisation’s work is transposed by a series of stagings.

Michal Halfam proves that he is as comfortable with images taken directly from reality as he is with the optical maze images he creates, giving a circumstantial approach a universal value.