Out of the forced procrastination of the last year and a half, the artists exhibiting in Apple Flavor decided to observe the Zula as a space that allows us to linger together, without an essential purpose. The pandemic obliged us to shut our blinds, with each one in their own corner, and left some of us idle, simply sprawled and staring. This ‘deep boredom’, a rare state of mind that many of us avoid in everyday life, holds within itself a potential. It offers us the opportunity to quit the race of life, to devote ourselves to uncertainty, and to pay attention to the essence of humanity [1]. In an era when every hour of the day can be translated into working time, the freedom to not-do is often accompanied by guilt to the point that it becomes almost impossible. The Zula is thus an ex-territory: it provides a refuge where we can sit back, together.

The source of the word Zula comes from the Arabic word ZAWAL - which can be interpreted as Dawdling as well as Sunset. We can imagine the Zula as a place where the sun lingers on the horizon, stuck in dusk, twisting and dragging time itself. De facto, it serves as a no-man’s-land, invaded by adolescents in order to reunite and fulfil forbidden desires. It is this very tension that Apple Flavor’s artists seek to examine: What can the extreme indolence that occurs at lecherous twilight generate ?

The singularity of the Zula is also related to its location, far from the authoritarian center “that keeps on writing itself with houses and textes”, that scribbles the peripheral area as “a generous or sloppy footnote”[2]. The aesthetics of the company town leaks into the Zula, when each one of its members brings to the space whatever they find appropriate and then marks or vandalizes it, so that it will become part of the whole.

Carolina Lehan brings signs of vandalism into the Zula with her “windows” that imitate the familiar motif of the security bars identified in the company town’s construction. Lehan’s swing set, as well as the one created by Oded Yones, refers to the urban Zula that exist without a permanent structure, mostly in the public garden that change its nature each day: At daylight it hosts children for their play time, after dark it becomes a temporary Zula conquered by teenagers seeking for a place to discharge their hormones and aggression.

The will or the need to deal with the peripheral brought the artists to develop a common interest in the esoteric, the mystical and the mythical as one — be it in Lehan’s work’s reference to Gorgona, or the presence of Ré the egyptian sun god in Meshi Cohen’s work, or the take off on the horoscope of Yones’ in his Longing.

Longing and yearning, probably central to our first youth experiences, are diffused from the speaker laying on Uri Weinstein’s sofa, mumbling words from the song “An Answer to Love” by the band Zula Members.

One law exists in the Zula’s anarchy: Even if the object is identified with the person who brought it, from the moment it enters the space it becomes common property. Meshi Cohen, Carolina Lehan, Uri Weinstein and Oded Yones - all 2019 graduates of Bezalel, Jerusalem’s Academy of Fine Arts - decided to collaborate here (for the second time) and to destabilise the absolute relation expected between one object and its creator. The Zula that they built for Apple Flavour blends their various visual languages and challenges the dominant dogma in the contemporary art world that praises the individual and their unique signature. Here, they offer instead a collective process where an exhibition is composed through a shared effort, in a scattered dialogue, yet not necessarily decentralized.

- Noam Alon, 2021

[1]  Agamben, Giorgio. Heller-Roazen, trans. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1 April 1998. P. 68

[2] Pedaya, Haviva. My translation