Scars on the rocks:
Andreas Golinski site specific project for Hezi Cohen Gallery is a result of research he conducted during a two-month stay in Tel Aviv in the framework of the Tel Aviv-Dusseldorf artists‘ exchange program, initiated by the Goethe Institut and the NRW Kunst-Stiftung organization. Golinski’s project is centered on architect Louis Kahn’s revolutionary proposal for the restoration of the Hurva Synagogue in 1968, a proposal that was never put into effect. Kahn’s sketch is given a new lease on life by Golinski, who has used it as his guide to build a sculptural-architectural model, which succeeds in powerfully evoking issues essential to the course of action of contemporary art, such as destruction, restoration, commitment to the vision of the past, and necromancy. The conceptual aspect of the work is validated by the fact that this is the fulfillment of something that originally didn’t exist (Kahn’s plan), and due to Golinski’s fluctuation between working in different scales and contexts—sculptural, architectural, and miniature. The work remains faithful to Kahn’s vision, who wanted to leave the synagogue’s ruins exposed and to put up a building that would not hide them. Golinski has responded to Kahn’s proposal in a unique way. Kahn wanted to preserve the ruins and not put on a bogus spectacle of restoration. Golinski has revived a proposal whose essence was to leave the ruins in place. Nonetheless, the installation he has created for the gallery turns into an independent space, which brings together an unresolved vision of the past that cannot be expropriated, lying in its ruins and avoiding any illusion of overcoming. The ruins are surrounded by a skeleton of inclined modules made of stainless steel. The outcome is a multilayered installation—pagan and monotheistic, abandoned but with a potential for revival, broken and geometric, finite but with a modular logic of expansion—which turns a building proposal that emphasizes destruction into an act of creation, and of repair.