Gazing- Online Viewing Room

The works in this exhibition depicts various gazing propositions starting from the gaze of the artists to the gazing of the subjects up to the viewers’ gazing creating a cross-over between the boundaries of art and reality. Participating artists: Daniel Enkaoua, Maya Bloch, Michele Bubacco, Itamar Freed, and Dana Pakman.

“If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee” — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

Examining “the gaze,” or rather, the way we look at a subject, and how a subject looks back at us, remains one of the most intriguing ways to understand an artwork’s narrative. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic, direct gaze at the viewer and Vermeer’s female subjects’ lonely, diverted eyes have captivated art historians for centuries.

Michel Foucault examines the peculiar function of the gaze in “Las Meninas” and argues that the ensuing relationship between the gaze of the spectator and the gaze of the painting break down the usual binary nature of the gaze (i.e. between viewer/gaze and viewed/gaze). In this painting, the spectator himself becomes the subject of the painting, captured by the gaze of the painter insofar as he remains a spectator gazing at the painting. As the spectator thus becomes part of the spectacle the “observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. The communication between the two gazes blurs the boundaries between the two roles until it becomes unclear who exactly is gazing at whom; the gaze becomes a mode of interaction between spectator and the work of art.