In a time when representation has become a main venue to perceive ourselves and others; in a time when individual moments are largely substituted by obsessive reenactments of collective fantasies extracted from magazines, film and social media, I feel an urge to explore the possibility or the impossibility of finding an authentic self through art, a term ironically rooted in the word artifice, as Simone de Beaouvoir noted more than half a century ago.
Through photography, video, performance, text and installation, I deal with issues such as role-play, self-representation, success and appropriation. Being a woman-artist, my journey began with the feminine body, for if what we perceive as masculine can be represented by a large number of attributes related to action (the warrior, the businessman, the poet, God...), the only requisite for femininity to be successful is related to the feminine body - for its looks, for its ability to give birth.
These themes have accompanied me through the last year and a half, as I began exploring the persona of the most important art critic in Israel as reflected in the social media for my solo exhibition "Galia Yahav – Self Portrait", in Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv.
The prime material for the exhibition is the archive that assembles Yahav's Facebook persona, from declarative posts (personal experiences, political views, works of art, selfies…) through which Yahav chooses to represent herself to the audience; through comments made by her followers and fans; to the art reviews she publishes in Haaretz newspaper.
For the Sand Works (photography), for example, I chose posts by Yahav for their promotional, branding, nature then photographed them, carved in the sand with my handwriting. In the sound piece Mirror-Mirror 100 comments by Yahav's fans to her posts reverberate in a confined space, reflecting back an idealized image; the PowerPoint work, Artist, Test Yourself, deals with the absurdity in the artists attempts to make their works fit to the establishment's taste, for remarkable art, like personal taste, is more than the sum of its components and success is impossible to predict. The video Trying to Break Through exposes the hierarchy between the artist and the critic through my futile attempts to get her to see my exhibitions while in the photograph Honorary Citizen I appear in front of a tableau composed of hundreds of portraits, most of them of people from the art scene (Zamir Shatz, 2015), with my face covering Yahav's portrait in a symbolic coup.
Through the works, I reorganized the character of the star-critic, very much like a portraitist that appropriates and interprets the subject in front of her on a canvas, immortalizing thus, not so much the subject of the paining, but herself. This act of immortalization, presented in a determined and recognized art space (that in this case acts like a quality stamp), is for me a victory of the artistic, reflexive, representation over the compulsive self-representation in the social media or, in other words: the victory of the portrait over the selfie.
January, 2016
Through photography, video, performance, text and installation, I deal with issues such as role-play, self-representation, success and appropriation. Being a woman-artist, my journey began with the feminine body, for if what we perceive as masculine can be represented by a large number of attributes related to action (the warrior, the businessman, the poet, God...), the only requisite for femininity to be successful is related to the feminine body - for its looks, for its ability to give birth.
These themes have accompanied me through the last year and a half, as I began exploring the persona of the most important art critic in Israel as reflected in the social media for my solo exhibition "Galia Yahav – Self Portrait", in Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv.
The prime material for the exhibition is the archive that assembles Yahav's Facebook persona, from declarative posts (personal experiences, political views, works of art, selfies…) through which Yahav chooses to represent herself to the audience; through comments made by her followers and fans; to the art reviews she publishes in Haaretz newspaper.
For the Sand Works (photography), for example, I chose posts by Yahav for their promotional, branding, nature then photographed them, carved in the sand with my handwriting. In the sound piece Mirror-Mirror 100 comments by Yahav's fans to her posts reverberate in a confined space, reflecting back an idealized image; the PowerPoint work, Artist, Test Yourself, deals with the absurdity in the artists attempts to make their works fit to the establishment's taste, for remarkable art, like personal taste, is more than the sum of its components and success is impossible to predict. The video Trying to Break Through exposes the hierarchy between the artist and the critic through my futile attempts to get her to see my exhibitions while in the photograph Honorary Citizen I appear in front of a tableau composed of hundreds of portraits, most of them of people from the art scene (Zamir Shatz, 2015), with my face covering Yahav's portrait in a symbolic coup.
Through the works, I reorganized the character of the star-critic, very much like a portraitist that appropriates and interprets the subject in front of her on a canvas, immortalizing thus, not so much the subject of the paining, but herself. This act of immortalization, presented in a determined and recognized art space (that in this case acts like a quality stamp), is for me a victory of the artistic, reflexive, representation over the compulsive self-representation in the social media or, in other words: the victory of the portrait over the selfie.
January, 2016
