Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Yael Davids, an Israeli-born artist based in Amsterdam since 1990, is dealing with the human body as object, space and architecture, often using performance to explore issues of social violence. She creates large scale constructions that act as barriers, stages, platforms, enclosures onto which groups of people perform the same action. Through this homogenized interaction with the performative site, Davids' work reveals concepts of discord and redundancy, and tensions that arise between group, individual, people and space. Davids does not directly document the live event, but instead gathers in a geological manner the evidence that allows us to imagine the performance, what may follow and, significantly, deals with emptiness that follows the lived moment. Most recently, her work has been shown at Galleria Enrico Fornello, Prato (solo), Here We Dance at Tate Modern, London, End on Mouth, Israeli Center of Digital Art, Holon, Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam (solo), Playground Festival, STUK, Leuven, ArTempo: Where Time Becomes Art, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice Biennial, and Memorial to the Iraq War, ICA, London. Davids has won the Prix Nouvelles Images (1999) and the Charlotte Köhler Award (1997). Her work was exhibited in 1998 in the group-show UNLIMITED.NL at de Appel.
Yael Davids, an Israeli-born artist based in Amsterdam since 1990, is dealing with the human body as object, space and architecture, often using performance to explore issues of social violence. She creates large scale constructions that act as barriers, stages, platforms, enclosures onto which groups of people perform the same action. Through this homogenized interaction with the performative site, Davids' work reveals concepts of discord and redundancy, and tensions that arise between group, individual, people and space. Davids does not directly document the live event, but instead gathers in a geological manner the evidence that allows us to imagine the performance, what may follow and, significantly, deals with emptiness that follows the lived moment. Most recently, her work has been shown at Galleria Enrico Fornello, Prato (solo), Here We Dance at Tate Modern, London, End on Mouth, Israeli Center of Digital Art, Holon, Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam (solo), Playground Festival, STUK, Leuven, ArTempo: Where Time Becomes Art, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice Biennial, and Memorial to the Iraq War, ICA, London. Davids has won the Prix Nouvelles Images (1999) and the Charlotte Köhler Award (1997). Her work was exhibited in 1998 in the group-show UNLIMITED.NL at de Appel.