Pardes, (Grove of Orange Trees): Dani Karavan
by Ana Maria Torres
The opposition of paradise and destruction is what the visitor encounters at the site-specific environment Pardes that the Israeli artist Dani Karavan created especially for the IVAM, Institute of Modern Art in Valencia. As the artist explained "I finally decided to create an environment which is from ‘here’, from Valencia, but which is also from ‘there,’ from the country where I was born, from Israel." There is spiritual familiarity in the basic geometrical ordering of olive and orange trees, rubble, cacti, ladders, and language. All are talismans, aids to memory, and stimulants for imaginations.
From the point of arrival at the museum, the viewer becomes intrigued by the three groves of orange trees in front of the gallery windows. Inside the galleries the environment is contained in five rooms that are connected in a line. They maintain the emphasis on axis of all of Dani Karavan’s work. In the first room you pass by two olive trees; one that stands upright and the second that is hanging upside down. The olive trees are surrounded by copies of Andrea Da Firenze’s 14th Century fresco from the Santa Maria Novella church, Cappella degli Spagnoli (Florence). The walk through the next three galleries is bordered by groves of orange trees on the left and a pond of water, containing train tracks, cactus and gold fish, on the right. The walk along the axis is interrupted by piles of rubble and white ladders which must be circumvented by the viewer.
In the final gallery a cast sculpture of a cactus emerges from a hill of sand in the center of the room. Also in this room one can see Karavan’s environmental works shown through pictures and videos. Through his permanent site specific work and this temporary exhibition, he reminds us that to belong to a place means to ‘have a grip’ in a concrete everyday sense. By organizing the familiar to discuss fundamental oppositions, he gives the visitor a sense of security by symbolizing an eternal environmental and cultural order. He resolves the most basic problem of the human being, which is to regain lost place.
