Soft Skills II
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Soft Skills II is a group exhibition that brings together five international female artists.
While Soft Skills I was about the body as a battleground for identity struggles, the second part of the exhibition series presents a new concept of power, one that is driven by sensitivity, consciousness and confidence, rather than dominance and force. The exhibited works are enigmatic, sensual and sometimes mystical incarnations of softness and resonance as a practice represented in actions and bodies alike. They are connected by a mutual energy all artists share and the skill to read between lines, being in correspondence with ones surroundings. Working in various mediums, from drawing to sculpture and video, the artists are united in a new vision for coexistence and togetherness, that fosters connectivity and care.

Yael Bartana presents three still images from the video work Malka Germania. The work was created as part of a solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Berlin and explores the longing for collective redemption as a response to an era of anxiety. ‘Malka Germania’ refers to an extraordinary female vocation of the Messiah, who arrives in Berlin and causes a series of changes in the city: the past and the future erupt into an alternative present.

Chen Cohen shows two works. The photograph Spooning is part of her series Kitchen Residency, for which she moved her studio into her kitchen. The minimal photographs depict a simple household item, showing different layers of meaning behind a seemingly banal object. Spooning is an image of a big spoon embracing a smaller spoon, alluding to Motherhood and care while her work Gate indirectly refers to the soft skill it needs in order
to move from one sphere to the other.

Michal Helfman draws a woman and a vase merging into one body and a woman holding a bouquet of flowers looking at the empty vase.

Christine Moldrickx work is also a gesture of care and sensuality. She used a thermal camera to film her body, being accompanied by a man, who is only represented due to a few words he speaks in the beginning of the video. The outcome is a rather abstract depiction of a journey on the skin, that radiates and seems to beam warmth onto the viewer. Usually used in medical contexts and in the military, Moldrickx inverts the common function of the medium for a personal and intimate operation.

Yehudit Sasportas’ work The Witness, is part of a series of blindfolded created drawings of birds and desert animals that she records, documents and draws during the night, as part of the Liquid Desert project. The project deals with mapping our collective subconscious space. The drawings are done blindfolded in communication with the birds in the field and the data from the field cameras at the site itself, which record and create a direct
connection to the movement of the animals during the night hours in real-time.