“Spectacular Failure,” CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo’s annual group exhibition, examines the generative role that failure – losing, coming up short – has played in Israeli art over the past fifty years. At a time when we are bombarded with slogans of “total victory” and “together we will win,” this preoccupation has become especially poignant. The participating artists don’t abandon the strange, playground dichotomy of winning and losing, but rather undermine it from within, by identifying with the side of failure.

The exhibiting artists – some working since the mid-1970s, others working today – deal with representations of failure across culture: from personal disappointments to social blunders to the absurdity of military ethos. They embody the role of the loser, engage the “unsuccessful” aesthetic of the makeshift and the provisional, and use dark humor – all as a way to puncture official narratives and lay bare our reality in all of its uncomfortableness.

“Spectacular Failure” is curated by Tamar Margalit.

Yael Frank

Seven Attempts to Bring Back the Sun, 2007

Still from video

Courtesy of the artist