Adi Oz-Ari

Statement

I engage in the body, which I view as a machine, attracted to moments of breakdown. Illness and pain are the raw materials comprising my personal alchemy. A feeling of discovery ensues when the two coalesce into an image. Inert and organic materials originating in my own and foreign bodies are the elements with which I work. Similar to a chemical reaction, they undergo a transformation to come together into a lyrical image that sometimes loses its source entirely a process of abstraction.

Similar to producing a sound which is reflected back as an echo, my work turns to parallel worlds which respond in poetry, painting, and body art. These are the realms which I visit from time to time and from which I always return to photography, as I am deeply rooted in its tradition and history.

Although I am a photographer, I rarely make documentary works. I work mainly with existing photographic materials which become the working tools in my experimental laboratory in which images are constructed and deconstructed. I frequently make use of X-rays, road maps, and photographs from books and printed periodicals. I consider them puzzles or codes I seek to decipher. Paradoxically, the decoding process mostly creates a new secret. Over the past few years, scanning has become my major work mode. While the camera is the natural extension of the eye and body of the subject who gazes, the scanner maintains an objective distance, without a stance or hierarchy, remaining simultaneously unemotional and sensuous.

Throughout my years of making art, I make frequent use of archaic manual processes which have become almost irrelevant. Art enables me to engage in unnecessary actions with their technical clumsiness as I long for materiality in a world in which it is absent. In my new series, I use a simple office stapler and hundreds of staples to create precise and orderly circles. The prosaic, characterless material encounters an abstract, ritual, impractical action. In many senses, the work distills my action mechanisms: identifying existing material whose functionality originates in the non-art world; appropriating, abstracting, and transforming it. The material loses its original function as it creates a singular, unique, and poetic new world.

GlogauAIR Project

One day, about a year and a half ago, I noticed there was something wrong with my cell phone display: all the images, colors, and icons were suddenly jumbled. I took photos of these glitches and disruptions and decided to blow up the images by hundreds of percent, replacing their familiarity with a menacing, almost cinematic effect. A different materiality surfaced, leading me to explore an entirely new medium: I started looking into embroidery, more specifically digital embroidery, as I was more interested in contemporary mechanisms than in crafts. I started looking for an expert in the field of digital embroidery. It was important that while working with large-scale machines, I would be capable of controlling each thread individually. During a recent visit to England, this research led me to Jacky Puzey – together we selected the fabrics, threads and degree of stretching of the fabric, to create the first pieces of this series.

This would be the first project I would like to focus on during my residency. Not long ago, I have reached out to Rolf Siebert of the Stickerei Berlin Company, specializing in this type of digital embroidery. The GlogauAIR residency would provide me an opportunity to work closely and personally with these local experts, and to continue this dialog, collaboration, and material exploration for the creation of new works for the digital disruption series.

In many of my works I use materials I find in my surroundings, which I put through various material and visual transformations. I respond to my surroundings, and therefore any change in location generates new insights and ideas. To find these materials I regularly visit flea markets, and explore newspapers and magazines, medical charts, and even people – actual bodies around me. In the series titled Bodies, for example, I take photographs of bruises on bodies of people around me. Printing these images on a paper that is not meant for printing, I am able to lose control of the final image and let the printer create its own ink contusions, resulting in abstract images of body-machine colorful internal bleeding. This series is also connected to a recurring subject in my work – that of pain, sickness and corporal features, and specifically the relationship between pain and pleasure.

These days I am working on a new series of works related to these issues and practices, which I would like to develop and execute during the residency. To this end, I intend to bring my scanner with me, which I use as a camera to explore different objects and images. Lately, I have been working with charts and images produced by medical imaging devices – EKG diagrams, X-rays, angiograms, etc. In Berlin, I would like to gain access to similar materials, which would surely have their own local features. I intend to peruse the same practice dynamics and generative processes – whichever medical objects I encounter will dictate the character of the works I will create, and one work will generate the next.

On a final note, I am very excited for the opportunity the residency would provide for a close encounter with German contemporary art. I feel a connection, a common language, with many German artists, some of them (such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, and Florian Maier-Aichen) being great sources of inspiration for me. I am also intrigued by the encounters your program brings about between artists of different cultures, which I perceive as enriching and vital to my practice and artistic process.

CV Summary

Lives and works in Tel Aviv

Education

• 2013-2015 MFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel
• 2009–2012 BFA, Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Kfar Sava, Israel
• 1999–2003 B.Des,(Design) College of Management and Academic Studies, Givatayim, Israel

Selected Solo Exhibitions

• 2019 Epidermis, Hamaabada Le Zilum (Photography Lab) Gallery, curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
• 2019 Out of Place, The Lobby Art Space, Tel Aviv (with Raafat Hattab), curators: Leor Grady, Orit Shershevski
• 2017 My Madonna, Tel Aviv Artist’s House, curator: Vera Pilpoul
• 2013 Knife in the Water, Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv (with Liraz Pank), curator: Reuven Kuperman

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 2020 Winners of the Air Land 3.0 / Inside Land Prize, Museum of Contemporary Arts/ Ex Officine Ferroviarie di Barge, Torino, Italy
• 2019 Reflections, Neve Shechter Art Center, Tel-Aviv, curator: Shira Fridman
• 2018 Steel City, Ken HaKukia Art Space, Tel-Aviv, curators: Gilat Nadivi and Vera Pilpoul
• 2017 The 5th International Photography Festival, Portfolio view of 10 artists, 10 artists Tel Aviv
• 2017 Traverse Video Festival, Toulouse, France, curators: Simone and Pierre Dompeyre
• 2017 The Core Project, RUA RED Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, curator: Matthew Nevi
• 2017 Capture the Moment, Galleri Norrsken, Stockholm, Sweden
• 2017 A Village You Are and to a Village You Will Return, Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, curator: Raafat Hattab
• 2017 Empire II, Castello 1610/A, Venice, Italy, curator: Vania Balogh
• 2016 AVI-Art Video International Festival, Jerusalem
• 2016 The Unknown, The Different and The Bizarre, Beit Michal Art Center, Rehovot, curator: Carmit Blumenson
• 2016 In Between, Florentin 45 Contemporary Art Space, Tel Aviv, curators: Gilat Nadivi and Vera Pilpoul
• 2014 Revealment and Concealment, Bialik House Museum, Tel Aviv, curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
• 2014 Confessions, The Artists’ Residence, Herzliya, curator: Karni Barzilay
• 2010 Secret Art, Beit Mani, Tel Aviv, curators: Doron Pollak and Esti Drori

Gallery