Sharon Ya’ariThe Romantic Trail and the Conrecte House

How do formal and ideal influences continue in a different reality of life? The Israeli photographer Sharon Ya’ari pursues such questions in the exhibition he developed for Haus Esters, which is at the same time his first solo exhibition in Germany. Built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the end of the 1920s, Haus Esters and Haus Lange are among the icons of modern architecture in Germany, buildings to which notions of an open, future-oriented society can be attached. Ever since the former private houses have been used as venues for contemporary art, they have repeatedly inspired artists to engage with their particular atmosphere and architecture. Sharon Ya’ari ties in with this tradition of site-specific work by developing new works and series for Haus Esters on the basis of his own reality of life. The starting point of his photographic search for traces is the connection between the ideas of European modernism between the world wars and the attempt to continue them in the young state of Israel. He traces the legacy of the modernist formal language in his home country. In doing so he is not concerned with the perspective of architectural photography, but with the marginal, with the relics of everyday life, with the fragile relationships between people and the elements of their environment. The utopias of modernism overlap with the history of their ruptures and with a conflict-laden everyday reality of today. The search for traces of the great visions of modernism thus becomes, as it were, a mirror of the conditions of human existence.

Exhibitions:
Haus Esters/Kunstmuseen Krefeld, 8/3/2020 – 21/3/2021
Oldenburger Kunstverein, 23/4 – 11/7/2021
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 23/7 – 27/9/2021