Tinker Shiray: I’m Not Fine  ***ART  ***

I’m Not Fine  ***ART  *** was born from Tinker Shiray’s (b. 1977; lives in the Zuqim community in the Arava) ceaseless movement between living within a social frame and the primal urge to break free from it. Art, for her, is an elemental language—one that rejects the impulse to classify and categorize, seeking to slip away from the dictates of logic and identity. This tension between the impulsive and the singular gives rise to the exhibition as an evolving entity—a moment in which the self melts into the image and returns to life itself.

The exhibition features a new ten-meter painting created over the span of nine months. The working process results in a scroll-like form, and the exhibition offers a pristine moment in which the full sequence of images is revealed as such. The painting is made of pigments that the artist concocts from materials and objects she finds in her close vicinity: olive “ink,” pomegranate, iodine, blueberries, mortar bombs, ammunition remnants. These materials-turned-pigments are charged onto the surface of the canvas, carrying traces of time, injury, and layers of reality. The painting becomes an arena of restless motion, teeming with dozens of potential occurrences, glances, entrances, and exits.

The disrupted orientation produces an experience of dizziness, while also evoking regression and calm. The painting is an eruption of motion, disallowing the gaze to stabilize and making it difficult to tell where the painting begins and where it ends. Part playground, part torture chamber, it swarms with male-female creatures, at once living, vegetal, and inanimate; a zone containing both spirit and matter. In Tinker’s world, time and direction are peripheral concerns. Her sway unsettles balance, clouds the senses, and formulates new relationships with the very sense of orientation.

The paintings in the series Self-Portrait on Sandpaper (2018-25) present Tinker’s expanding, shifting self on a surface that overwhelms consciousness. In the video Swing, Tinker returns to an archive of videotapes she shot between 1999 and 2001, before the era of reality television, re-engaging with the shelved footage. Her documented iconic figure moves through the streets of 1990s Tel Aviv. She carries a video camera, perpetuating herself as an urban flâneur, in a time when a camera was not a common everyday device, the gaze was not automatic, and photography was an act of selection. The desire to document was sparked not by habit but by awe, and the camera served as a kind of shield. Tinker’s camera moves freely, recalling the early practices of video artists who explored the freedom the device afforded and its power to capture reality. Her inquisitive gaze pushes the boundaries of both body and cinematic frame.

The figure reaches a playground and climbs onto a swing; she gasps, stretches, and leans against the swing as if it were her refuge in the world, letting something catch her—whether the physical swing or the metaphysical motion. The metronomic rhythm continues: liberation and restraint, girlhood and womanhood, a tomboy/Lolita teasing her surroundings and herself. She shifts roles: artist, director, photographed subject, swinger, spectator. Like the artist, her figure continues a long artistic and cultural tradition of swing imagery: from ceremonial swings in ancient cultures that marked transitions between worlds and states of consciousness; through the Rococo paintings of Watteau and Fragonard, where the swing signifies pleasure and youth alongside a breach of convention; to the video works of Pipilotti Rist, in which body, image, and motion swirl into a beguiling sensory experience.

The interplay between painting and video generates a world whose existence rests on the ability to disconnect and reconnect fully. Through swinging—physical, imaginary, medium-based—Tinker opens new realms of consciousness, introducing the swing as an aesthetic authority that affirms moments of contemplation. The experience of oscillation, back and forth, awakens an internal mechanism that enables the body to break free from social orders. In a soft physical gesture, the girl-woman swings between reality and imagination, revealing complex relationships between body, camera, and the world.

Special thanks to: Eyal Shirai, Hafi Bohm, Amit Eini, Ronan Hoffman and Carney Foster for the dxmi song