In the exhibition: Tree incubator (Live statue), drawings, video work, and tattoo machine drawings on silicon.

Following the opening night of her exhibition Shahar Yahalom will leave for New-York, for MFA studies at Columbia University. Yahalom is the winner of the Young Artist Award of the ministry of Culture and Sports for 2012. Among other venues she has exhibited: final nominees for the Gottesdiener award exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum at 2011. On 2009 she exhibited at the Herzliya Biennial and Art TLV.Biennial.

“…Following past exemplary shows in which Shahar Yahalom masterfully created objects and installations that corresponded with the contemporary art discourse, in her present exhibition she examines the borders of the high road of the art discourse in which she conducted herself so naturally. The exhibition ED raises the possibility of the turn towards perversion. This possibility is found in canonic aesthetic doctrines that see in the artist one to whom the law, the example or school do not constitute a barrier, but rather a leverage.

… Beyond the description of the artist’s action of drawing, the word “drawing” in Hebrew applies to different forms of drawing, such as literary notes, supply lists, or any other type of list in which something is written, jotted down, leaving a mark. In Hebrew the name of Shahar Yahalom’s current exhibition ED encapsulates within it at least two meanings of “Drawing”. On the one hand it is vapor, which is at once visible yet will soon dissipate. Similarly to the random scribbling of the grocery list that will soon be forgotten after it will be replaced with the groceries themselves. Yet it also keeps the meaning as a witness that will remember and remind of the occurrences.”

-Taken from the ED exhibition text “Five Remarks on Drawing” by Efrat Biberman.

A conversation between Nechami Gotlib and Shahar Yahalom

Question: What brought you to create an incubator for a tree?

Answer: The incubator originated as a thought of an object, a collage of ready-made objects. One of the images used as a source for the work is a photograph of the first space shuttle to land on the moon, Apollo 11. The space shuttlecraft seemed to me as a collection of junk pieces, and it wasn’t clear how such a thing managed to reach the moon. The fantasy that guided me was taking a Sycamore tree, whose origin is in North America, there is a difference in its behavior in Israel and at its natural habitat abroad, so I wanted to build it a space or “space craft” – a space constructed from many elements. The tree is physically too weak to sustain the fantasy, the incubator suffocates it rather then allowing it to live. There is use of every bit of air in the space, there is no one consolidation point. Near the tree sculpture/ incubator there is a Styrofoam sculpture that creates a sort of glacier and snow or ice flakes. Above the tree, there is a lamp that is a source of energy.

Question: The use of “ready made” in your works is new. In the previous works there was always a wish to “invent” something.

Answer: That’s right, in this exhibition there isn’t an expression of freedom in the sculptural work. In this case I didn’t want to invent, but rather to combine things, create objects that are not sculpted.

Question:  Why not sculpt?

Answer: In my previous works, and especially in the work “Raspberry Land” that was exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum, the sculpting was very physical, erupting, grand and full of passion, abounding in creation, not taking into consideration anything besides itself. This exhibition is the complete opposite; it brings out a will to think from the other side of the ball. It’s a struggle not to sculpt. There is use of living and breathing material as the tree and the air that creates the interactions on its own – A living sculpture.

Question: And the video work “Window Over Dead Body”?

Answer: The video is a window, a diversion, the escape of a glance. This was taken in a dissection room (the room in which autopsies by medical students take place), the gaze of the living upon the dead. The gaze is constantly attracted to the light sources, the window, the light, the outdoors. The gaze is diverted to the conditions rather then the object.

Question: The work “Map” is a drawing done by using a tattoo machine on silicon surface, what brought you to this type of work?

Answer: The drawing is impressed upon the material, penetrates it, enters through it. It does not exist merely upon the surface.