This exhibition features two series of printed matter objects by Dina Hoffman. In the first series she has invented a magazine for young children, titled \u201cToys\u201d and printed by Dina Hoffman Press. As her point of departure, Hoffman relates to children\u2019s literature and toys as tools for expressing emotions, which pass through phrases and concepts we have all grown up on. These tools serve as raw materials for her creation, based on the assumption that toys are part of a simulation and survival strategy that connects the conceptual to the abstract and the intuitive to the rational. Hoffman deals with the \u201cserious\u201d side of play and absurdity via unmediated or hybridic connections as a creative route that has been characteristic of Dadaism from its inception. The collages deal with memory and bereavement during wartime as educational values. Using the language of children, the artist criticizes the banal and pedagogic patterns of creativity that distract children from the topics that really occupy them. The \u201ceducational\u201d issues challenge the imagination with humor that is often sarcastic, deriving from \u201cmistakes\u201d in differentiating between source and replica with respect to cultures, rituals, and conflicting cultural languages, thus resulting in wars not between children but rather between countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the artist\u2019s consciousness and for the viewer as well, bereavement, memory and playfulness take on a painful and almost intolerable significance, particularly with respect to our children on the warfronts, who have grown up on computer simulations and superhero movies. This is what Hoffman refers to in the second series in which she used Terrazzo tiles to create book bindings (without pages), based on digital processing of photographs of portraits of the artist\u2019s own puppets and superheroes, drawn in water colors. The names of these imaginary book titles are scattered among the portraits: \u201cWho will save us from His hands\u201d; \u201cThe puppet is almost as scary as reality\u201d; \u201cCorresponding with Marlene Dumas\u201d; and \u201cTickling Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Moustache\u201d, which serves as the title of the exhibition and is placed next to the portrait of the image of evil, Karagoz, taken from the series of leather and parchment puppets used in traditional Turkish shadow plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Izi Itzhak Civre<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Exhibition Curator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This exhibition features two series of printed matter objects by Dina Hoffman. In the first series she has invented a magazine for young children, titled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"exhibition-category":[206],"exhibition-tag":[],"class_list":["post-12834","exhibition","type-exhibition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","exhibition-category-archive-exhibition-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n