
העולם עדיין לא נרדם
וגם אני עדיין ערה
The World is Still Up, and I am Too Not Yet Asleep
Solo Exhibition, 2021, Oranim Gallery, Israel
Curator: Orit Bulgaro
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Tamar Oosterhof's solo exhibition addresses the innocence of the Junkyard in the Kibbutz kindergarten, a pedagogical concept conceived by Malkka Haas. The Junkyard is an arena of free, associative, even random, activities, accompanied by an intermediary interactions, in which objects made of real and authentic materials belonging to the adult world, are used by kindergarten children in their "play": "When the child is released into the Junkyard, he knows that he is in the field of realization, and not in the simulation of reality" (Haas, 2008).
As part of the Oranim Education College's residency program, Oosterhof moved into the same yard in which Haas established the first educational Junkyard many years ago, where she herself trained future educators in the method. Oosterhof converted the routine encounter between the object and the child that took place in that yard, into a series of casual encounters, centered around the acts acts of playing and creating - resulting in simultaneous processes of both revitalizing those actions, and archiving them.
The exhibition in the gallery began with Oosterhof's appeal to the surrounding kibbutzim to collect objects from Junkyards in their kindergartens. Thus, a material and thematic archive was built, created from artifacts emerging directly from the Kibbutzim movement's current material reality, and relating directly to its history and origins.
The entire exhibition is made up of objects collected by Oosterhof from 42 kindergarten Junkyards