Lexicon
 
 
While unorthodox, the decision to edit the MFA graduates show catalogue text in the format of a lexicon is an obvious one, at least in two aspects. 
In its form, the lexical arrangement of the catalogue is equivalent to the curatorial organization of the exhibition space in that it summons and generates accidental, unpredictable encounters between the artists, the artworks and the viewers. These encounters are set at the core of the curatorial practice, founded on the tension between the desire to avoid imposed hierarchy, and the attempt to elude slipping into anarchy. The alphabetical organization of the lexical format successful resolves this tension by maintaining a disciplining organizing principle, but does so in an arbitrary, and therefore essentially infinite and open manner. In other words, the lexicon leads the curatorial practice to its epitome through the very reduction to its zero point. 
In terms of content, the lexicon is exceptional in that it allows each and every artist to bring into focus the connection between their artistic subjects, objects, methods and gestures, by their introduction through the prism of one distinct concept. If the concept is perceived as a finite, preexisting, closed structure and the lexicon simply as a reservoir, such approach might be seen as reductive and restrictive. However, if one acknowledges the fact that concepts are multidimensional, open and reflexive discourse structures that do not describe existing phenomena and objects but rather actively partake in their creation, it is easy to understand how the lexicon, as a heterogeneous multiplicity of textual forms, best reflects the diversity of the exhibition itself. Some works engage with a specific concept – criticize it or challenge it, imagining different meanings than the ones normally ascribed to it.
Some works produce an imminent concept – illuminate new phenomena, produce something that was so far nameless. Some works generate relationships between concepts, new constellations for thought, action and excitement. Either way, the conceptual content, the lexical format, and particularly their combination, exemplify the fact that artworks conceptualize phenomena and objects, and do not define them, that art produces knowledge, and does not merely serve as its illustration. 
The concepts, selected and written by the artists themselves, are sideways to their practice, a parallel movement that does not wish to grasp the totality of their art, but rather present another aspect of it and point at a possible horizon vis-à-vis the questions preoccupying each and every one of them. The lexical complex manages to carefully delineate the similarities and differences between them and while doing so to characterize the common space in which the group was formed as such. Udi Edelman, Yoav Kenny
 
 
Executive co-editors
Mafte’akh, Lexical review of political thought
]mafteakh.tau.ac.il]