Shades of blue and purple produced using carbon paper are dominant in this exhibition by Nino Ahi Yuval. In tattoo art, a field in which the artist has been working in recent years, carbon paper is used to trace images onto the body and to erase, reposition and adjust them anatomically before carving them into the skin. Here carbon paper serves the artist both as a means of duplication and as an aesthetic device. After placing the carbon paper on the surface the artist creates a drawing, but its final form emerges only after the paper is lifted. The element of chance together with the artist’s intervention in the material generate a tension between the precise composition and the unexpected freedom of the image.
The works in this exhibition feature hybrid and fantastical figures, such as wolves that weep as they howl, unicorns, mermaids with animal bodies, dripping hearts and other expressive elements. Ahi Yuval defines her work as an ongoing search for that which does not exist in tangible reality and for new means of expression. She uses layers, engravings, erasures and duplications to generate a constant flow from material to image. Broken symmetry, straight lines and short texts are embedded in the surface, producing a raw visual language heavily influenced by marginal cultures, tattoo art styles, naïve art and folklore, comics and graffiti.
The artistic act takes place in a space where body and landscape intermingle, so that the body itself also serves as an experimental arena – a medium for expression, blurring and rewriting – and becomes an inseparable part of how the creative process is conceived. The queer nature of Ahi Yuval’s artistic practice is reminiscent of such Dadaist practices as breaking boundaries, dismantling norms and seeking freedom within the material and the image. Her experimentation with chance, disorder and lack of hierarchy is not merely aesthetic but rather part of her identity-based and concept-based inquiry. Body, image and landscape are transformed into a space in which identities and materials dissolve, become liquified, intermingle and are rewritten. Erasure, duplication, hybrid images and fluid materials create scenes that facilitate dialogue in the intermediate space between imagination and reality, a place where shape and identity are liberated from the obvious and from rigid systems. The artist’s focus on animalism and on connections within liminal spaces emphasizes fluidity, both gendered and material, and reinforces her exploration of material body, landscape and identity.
The topic of gender in the artist’s work is not static but rather a disintegrating, changing and fluid system. Thus the art here is not only the final product but also the manifestation of identity, action, and queer and feminist non-binary ideas.
Nitsan Shuval Abiri
Exhibition Curator
