"Bearing Wall," Michal Toniass's one person exhibition, will present a series of photographs of exposed walls taken by the artist at museums and galleries between exhibitions. On the walls of Basis Gallery, Tobiass will show museum walls and those of other hegemonic display spaces that will lend, as it were, history and memories to the new venue.
Tobiass suspends the short span of time between the physical presence of an exhibition and the complete disappearance of its traces creating thought-provoking documentation of time and space. Her action sways between major, "real," bygone event and a future "real" occurrence and takes place within a narrow time slot, the time of in-between-exhibitions, of exposed walls, so alien to active display spaces, which are therefore hurriedly and feverishly re-covered. To the walls' inherent historical, cultural and political sediments, she adds backstage activities that bring to the forefront practices such as hanging and installing that are – like the walls themselves – hidden from the beholder by adequate and appropriate display. According to Tobiass, she chooses to focus on exhibitions dealing with various mechanisms of deconstruction and witnessing such as Gideon Gechtman's at the Israel Museum and Gustav Metzger's at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, while trying to discover a common denominator between the artist's aesthetic-conceptual idiom and the seemingly random process of dismantling of his or her exhibition, in which he or she is often not present.