REDCAT presents Yael Davids: A Reading that Writes – a Physical Act II on view December 6–22, 2013.
In A Reading that Writes – a Physical Act II, Yael Davids describes the landscape surrounding the kibbutz where she grew up: “Uphill were the beautiful ruins of the old Arab village Suba. We called it “the Arab Tzuba,” not fully realizing what that meant. We loved walking there as kids. It was a beautiful place with a beautiful view—this was nature.” As the script develops, we learn that the landscape had been the site of a Palestinian village, its population displaced and its buildings dilapidating into nature.
The ambiguous status of objects and places, and how this ambiguity produces meaning, is central to Davids’ projects. In her performance installations, she considers the intersection of personal and political narratives, memory and history, the private and the public, and examines the body as a site of convergences and conflicts. What are the traces of history on the body, how does it respond to political context, and how does it function as a location of artistic practice? For Davids the body operates both as a documentary vessel, registering the present, and as a living search for a place within the institution and the grid.
At REDCAT, Davids will collaborate with Los Angeles-based dance artist taisha paggett, and together they will activate the installation through corporal configurations while reciting a script. Determined by the arrangement of objects—wooden structures, ropes and large glass plates—their movement will trace a transformation from horizontality to the verticality and vice versa. Simultaneously a group of participants will rearrange the glass plates in response to the script and the architecture of the gallery. The remnants of the performance will remain on view to explore the possibilities of the gallery space as a medium for documentation.
Yael Davids (born 1968; Kibbutz Tzuba, Israel), based in Amsterdam, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, sculpture studies at the Pratt Institute (New York) and dance pedagogy at the Remscheid Academy (Germany). Recent solo shows include Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; M – Museum, Leuven (2012); Circus Gallery, Berlin (2012); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Picture This, Bristol (2010); and If I Can’t Dance Tonight, Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam (2009), among others.
Funded in part with generous support from Mondriaan Fonds and the Artis Grant Program.
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