The public space at the Israeli Center for Digital Art features a new wall artwork by artist Yochai Avrahami. Share Our History is a collection of reliefs representing mundane figures and situations, originating from photographs that Avrahami took in recent years. While seemingly, they have nothing in common, the reliefs form a collage of the contemporary “face of the nation.” This assemblage of professional and private people, as well as objects, resonates with commercial advertising that seeks to capture the general essence of the country, to manufacture a single identity, or to brand it as a tourist resort. Among the figures: a kibbutznik; a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee shoreline; a municipal worker collecting yard waste; an IDF officer receiving a framed Holocaust and Heroism photocollage; two wrestlers and a referee; an Orthodox art teacher; a woman seated next to a Menorah statue at the Western Wall Tunnel, holding a prayer book; a reservist at a bus stop; a goldsmith polishing a Hanukkah menorah; people setting up a fencepost on the way to Sebastia at night; Ya’akov Ahimeir (a well-known TV anchor) hosting the international newscast, and others.
The work continues an established 20th-century tradition of reliefs that were created in an attempt to bestow a face upon the national body through the multitude it comprises, and to generate them as heroic images, which invoke pride and identity. Yet, while it is possible to identify here professions typical of historic reliefs, the work itself evokes the banal, the everyday, the humane, and the familiar, transcending/ the symbolic. The images-turned-reliefs appear to be cut from the Web, in a sculptural attempt at a Google Images result page. However, the sculpted objects are presented as figurines and artifacts excavated from an archeological site, or as fossils formed long ago. These figures have been abstracted from their particular narratives to become a sequence of symptomatic and stereotypical properties. At the same time, the viewer senses that it is only by zooming out of the details that another image is formulated, one that commands abstraction, symbolism, and a single narrative, which is both very local and temporary.
Producer: Shimrit Gil
Curator: Udi Edelman
This work was created with the generous support of Mifal HaPais, as part of the ongoing “Murals” project that comprises archival research and a series of artworks on public walls exploring the position of wall art today.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
