La distance entre V et W — Une exposition de Yael Davids — Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → May 16, 2015

Yael Davids — Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers présentent, jusqu’au 16 mai, la première exposition personnelle de Yael Davids en France. En jouan... 1 - Pas mal Critique

The Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers will be presenting Yael Davids’ first solo exhibition in France, marking the culmination of her residency which began in October 2014.

The artist has designed an installation that takes hold of space, exploring questions of territorial limits, their implications, and the cultural meanings and identities objects convey across temporal and geographic shifts and dislocations.

By deploying what could be described as a specific relation to the site of sculpture, Davids’ installation becomes a landscape, the panoramic view of a place. Using some of her chosen materials (armoured or reinforced glass, and clay plaster with black pigment), the installation confines the visitor’s movements in a space that produces a border experience, a sense of limit.

Yael Davids, A Reading that Writes — a Physical Act, 2013 Vue de la performance Installation à REDCAT, Los Angeles © Scott Groller

While her previous installations were grounded in a notion of interdependence between exhibition and performance — where the exhibition documents the performance, and the performance activates the exhibition — the Laboratoires exhibition focuses on the sculptural dimension, to the extent that the installation almost entirely excludes the possibility of a body in its midst. The artist has operated a horizontal shift — that of the large black screen featuring in some of her recent installations, such as Ending with glass in Basel in 2011. This slippage from wall to floor transforms the status of the surface, going from screen to expanse, from mirror to territory. Yael Davids’ recent performance scripts cited both Carl André and Richard Serra, thus locating her work in relation to a form of sculpture apprehended as place and as gravity. The place of sculpture, which could also be both the place of the artwork and the place of dwelling. And gravity as weight, the weight of bodies, objects and history.

Yael Davids, A Reading that Writes — a Physical Act, 2013 Vue de la performance Installation à REDCAT, Los Angeles © Scott Groller

Placing in this site a glass structure containing objects that refer to a domestic context provokes the landscape through the still life. The case, a reference to the wonder-rooms that are the indirect ancestors of the museum, is at once a sculptural object that can be approached from all sides and the miniature reduction of a much larger space. A space within a space, this container and showcase of objects is both a generator of narratives and the ‘hub’ of these multiple stories.

Moreover, still lifes are drawn by Yael Davids which reproduces objects bought by the artist at Aubervilliers. They document the infinite possibilities of display and stories these objects tell.

Yael Davids, A Reading that Writes — a Physical Act, 2013 Vue de la performance Installation à REDCAT, Los Angeles © Scott Groller

Yael Davids’ work has a singular way of linking two seemingly contradictory sculptural dimensions: abstraction and narration. By engaging with a history that is both national (that of a burgeoning nation) and individual (her own life story), Yael Davids constructs a project in which sculpture joins the body and space as a site of reception and activation of the conflicts that have in part shaped her life.

Yael Davids, Learning to imitate in Absen, 2011 Performance à la Kunsthalle de Bâle Courtesy de l’artiste et de la Kunsthalle de Bâle — © Eva Flury

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The practice of Yael Davids, between installation and performance, is developed at the intersection of personal and political domains. Pivot of her artistic practice, the body is considered as a space of reception and activation of convergences and conflits that partly constitute her. As a documentary channel, it records the present and bears the scars of history. It is a source of knowledge and a dynamic space of rewriting.

Yael Davids’ work deals with the inherent narrative potential of the act of documentation, and is also focused on the act of repetition. Guided by an economy of gestures and a constant interest in the notion of performance, her installations attempt to give shape to the memory of the ephemeral, the fleeting. They intermesh the conflict-loaded political history of a burgeoning nation and her personal life story, marked by loss and the experience of mourning, offering a confrontation between presence and absence.

Her work also focuses on the ambiguous status of objects and places, and on the way this ambiguity produces meaning.