Odd or Even / Noa Arad Yairi & Yuval Yairi

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זוג או פרד
אוצר: ניב גפני

החיים והאמנות כסאגה מתמשכת של פרידות ושיתופי פעולה

זוגות אמנים תמיד חיים דואליות מרגשת אך גם מסוכנת. כל אחד מהם נושא בתוכו שני קצוות, שתי ישויות, היומיומית והיוצרת, גוף שנושא בתוכו קולות שונים. במפגש ביניהם לא רק שני אנשים נפגשים, אלא ריבוי של זהויות ותודעות. המפגש אינו תמיד ברור או צפוי. לא תמיד ניתן לדעת מי פוגש את מי.
נעה ארד יאירי ויובל יאירי, זוג כבר כמה עשורים. כל אחד\ת הוא בן\בת זוג, הורה, והוא גם אמן\ית, תודעה פתוחה, מתרחבת, חורגת מגבולות הזמן והמקום. אך כל אחד נפרד ביצירתו
נעה עוסקת בפיסול, ציור ומיצב, עם דגש על עבודות תלויות מקום הנובעות ממחקר של נרטיבים היסטוריים, פוליטיים ותרבותיים הקשורים לאתר שבו הן מוצבות, לצד עיסוק מתמשך במרחב הנשי מתוך נקודת מבט פמיניסטית. יובל יוצר בתחומי הצילום, הווידאו והרישום, ועבודותיו עוסקות במקום ובמרחב מתוך מבט ביוגרפי, היסטורי ופוליטי. לכל אחד אזור משלו בסטודיו, קו גבול בין היצירות השונות וזמן עבודה שונה, נעה עובדת במהלך היום ויובל בערבים. שני מסלולים מקבילים, קרובים, נעים זה לצד זה מבלי להתמזג
מתוך המרחב המוכר והבטוח של החיים המשותפים הם החליטו להכניס את הקשר האישי אל תוך הקשר האמנותי. לראשונה הם בחרו לעבוד יחדיו לקראת תערוכה זו, ולא רק להציג יחד עבודות, אלא ממש ליצור יחד, להתערבב אחד לשניה בתוך העבודות, לערבב את המדיומים והטכניקות, ללמוד אחד מהשניה, לוותר ולהקשיב
מתוך כך נוצר גוף עבודות חדש שבו יחסים אישיים וחברתיים, משפחה, היסטוריה, אמנות, פוליטיקה ויומיום נשזרים אחד בשני. לצד העבודות המשותפות מופיעות גם עבודות אינדיבידואליות חלקן חדשות וחלקן עבודות קודמות
יחד הן יוצרות מרחב מרובד מחוות אמנותיות ומשמעויות המכיל אהבה, יאוש, בלבול וגם קצת תקווה
נעה ארד יאירי ויובל יאירי הם גם חלק מגרעין האמנים שבנה את המפעל
העשייה שלהם נטועה בהיסטוריה של המקום הזה, שנבנה מתוך שותפות, מתוך אמונה בכוח של פעולה משותפת, ומתוך רצון להרחיב מרחב שבו יצירה וחיים נפגשים

ثنائي أم فرد

أمينة المعرض: نيف جافني

الحياة والفن كرواية متواصلة من الفراقات والشراكات

أزواج الفنانين يعيشون دائمًا حالة ازدواجية مثيرة، لكنها أيضًا محفوفة بالمخاطر. كل واحد منهم يحمل في داخله طرفين، كيانين: اليومي والخلاق، جسد يحتوي أصواتًا متعددة. في لقائهم لا يلتقي شخصان فقط، بل تتقاطع هويات وزوايا من الوعي المتعدد. هذا اللقاء ليس دائمًا واضحًا أو متوقعًا، وليس من السهل دائمًا معرفة من يلتقي بمن.

نوعا أراد يائيري ويوفال يائيري زوجان منذ عدة عقود. كل واحد/ة منهما شريك/ة حياة، ووالد/ة، وهو/هي أيضًا فنان/ة، وعي مفتوح ومتسع، يتجاوز حدود الزمان والمكان. ومع ذلك، يبقى كل واحد منهما مستقلًا في إبداعه.

نوعا تعمل في النحت، الرسم، وأعمال التركيب، مع تركيز على أعمال مرتبطة بالمكان تنبع من بحث في السرديات التاريخية، السياسية والثقافية المرتبطة بالموقع الذي تعرض فيه الأعمال، إلى جانب انشغال مستمر بالفضاء النسوي من منظور نسوي.

يوفال يعمل في مجالات التصوير الفوتوغرافي، الفيديو والرسم، وتعالج أعماله المكان والفضاء من منظور سيري ذاتي، تاريخي وسياسي.

لكل واحد منهما منطقته الخاصة في الاستوديو، خط فاصل بين الأعمال المختلفة، ووقت عمل مختلف: نوعا تعمل خلال النهار، ويوفال في المساء. مساران متوازيان، قريبان، يسيران جنبًا إلى جنب دون أن يندمجا.

ومن داخل الفضاء المألوف والآمن للحياة المشتركة، قررا إدخال العلاقة الشخصية إلى داخل العلاقة الفنية. وللمرة الأولى اختارا العمل معًا تحضيرًا لهذا المعرض، لا لمجرد العرض المشترك، بل للخلق المشترك فعلًا: التداخل أحدهما في أعمال الآخر، مزج الوسائط والتقنيات، التعلم إحداهما من الآخر، التنازل والإصغاء.

ومن هنا نشأ جسد أعمال جديد، تتشابك فيه العلاقات الشخصية والاجتماعية، العائلة، التاريخ، الفن، السياسة واليومي. إلى جانب الأعمال المشتركة، تظهر أيضًا أعمال فردية، بعضها جديد وبعضها سابق.

معًا يخلقان فضاءً متعدد الطبقات من الإيماءات الفنية والدلالات، يحتوي حبًا، يأسًا، ارتباكًا، وقليلًا من الأمل أيضًا.

نوعا أراد يائيري ويوفال يائيري هما أيضًا جزء من نواة الفنانين الذين أسسوا هذا المشروع.

ممارستهما متجذرة في تاريخ هذا المكان، الذي بني على الشراكة، على الإيمان بقوة الفعل المشترك، وعلى الرغبة في توسيع فضاء يلتقي فيه الإبداع بالحياة.

Odd or Even

Curator: Niv Gafni
Life and art as an on-going saga of separations and collaborations
Artists couples live a thrilling yet dangerous duality. Each of them carries within them two poles, two personas: the everyday self, and the artist. A body that contains several voices. Their relationship is not merely a union between two people, but a multiplicity of identities and consciousnesses. The meeting is not always clear or predictable; It is not always possible to know who is meeting whom.
Noa Arad-Yairi and Yuval Yairi have been a couple for several decades. Each of them is a partner, a parent, and is also an artist, an open, expanding consciousness that exceeds the boundaries of time and place. Yet each remains distinct in their artistic practice.
Noa works in sculpture, painting and installation, with a particular interest in site-specific works that emerge from research into the historical, political, and cultural narratives of the locations in which she presents. Alongside her ongoing fascination with the female space and a feminist perspective.
Yuval works in the fields of photography, video and drawing. His works deal with place and space from a biographic as well as historic and political perspective.
Each one of the two have their own space in the studio: a clear border between their practices. As well as separate working hours: Noa works during the day, while Yuval works in the evenings. Two parallel tracks, moving closely to each other, yet never converge.
From the secure and familiar space of  their shared life, the couple decided to bring their personal relationship into the artistic one. For the first time, they chose to work towards this exhibition together. Not merely by showing their works side by side, but to truly create together, to intertwine with one another within the works, to blend media and techniques, to learn, to yield, and to listen to one another.
Through this process, formed a new body of work in which personal and social relationships, family, history, art, politics, and everyday life are interwoven.
Alongside the collaborative works, individual pieces are also presented – some new and some older. Together, they create a layered space of artistic gestures and meanings that holds love, despair, confusion, and also a small measure of hope.
Noa Arad-Yairi and Yuval Yairi are also a part of the core group of artists who established HaMiffal. Their practice is rooted in the history of this location, that originated from partnership, from faith in the force of collaborative action, and out of the will to hold space for the intertwining of creation and life

Flora Abyssus / Zohar Elazar & Yuval Yairi @Indie Gallery, TLV

Flora Abyssus

Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv

A dual exhibition by Zohar Elazar and Yuval Yairi    Curator: Etty Schwartz

In Flora Abyssus, two distinct photographic voices converge in a compelling dialogue about medium, perception, and transformation. Though Zohar Elazar and Yuval Yairi are familiar with each other’s work and have collaborated before, their methods and visual languages are strikingly different—sometimes even diametrically opposed.

Zohar Elazar
Elazar’s photographs are un-staged and shot on film in various locations, primarily in northern Israel. Her work embraces extreme lighting conditions, where photographic impressions emerge from near-total darkness or intense, contrasting light. These are spaces where light—the essential element of photography—is either overwhelming or entirely absent. After developing the film, she prints in the darkroom using an enlarger, scans the print, and creates a new source for enlargement. Her printing process becomes a crucial act of translation, where disorientation, inversion, and contrast form a visual language. The image may appear clear, but its meaning remains ambiguous, resisting direct interpretation.

Yuval Yairi
Yairi works in the studio, constructing still-life environments rich with objects that evolve over time. He photographs these scenes using a pre-set grid, dividing the composition into small squares. Within each, he integrates fragments from photographs taken at different moments, creating a layered image of multiple temporalities. A young cypress sapling is brought into the studio and placed in a custom-built artificial habitat—protected from natural and human threats—with the hope that it will grow stronger and eventually be planted in permanent soil. Beneath the surface, nourishing materials and symbolic objects are revealed, intended to support the tree’s development and prepare it for its future in the real world.
When the cultivation fails and the sapling dies, it becomes the subject of a new photographic series. Transparencies printed with images of cypresses—some living, some dead—are placed within glass structures reminiscent of the glass plates used in early photography.


The title Flora Abyssus evokes the biblical creation story, where the world begins in darkness over the abyss. Gradually, as the hovering spirit separates sky from water, life begins to emerge. This distant, zoomed-out perspective on existence contrasts with the close-up view of everyday life, where isolated moments are suspended from the natural flow. Uncertainty, collapse, and erosion are inseparable from growth and renewal. In this cyclical rhythm, growth and decay repeat themselves endlessly.

CloudMapping @ Fabienne Levy Gallery, opening February 16, 2023

CloudMapping / Justin Kamp

Time and place are not abstractions, in Yuval Yairi’s work, but rather intrinsically linked formal modes. Throughout the Israeli artist’s practice, he has persistently investigated how these two subjects operate as functions of one another: how a place lives in one’s mind not as a singular “decisive moment,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson might say, but as a conglomeration of successive views, gathered and arrayed over the course of a life. In “CloudMapping,” opening at Fabienne Levy Gallery on February 16th, Yairi continues these persistent investigations, broadening them into new material realms.

“CloudMapping” is the final part in a trilogy of shows that Yairi has developed over the past decade, all of which have captured, through means both plastic and photographic, the granular details of his Israeli homeland, its substrate of shattered bullets and cypress seeds. In “CloudMapping,” though, Yairi moves away from the camera’s direct representation. Here, instead, a realm of ink: architectonic drawings of seed pods and men, of boats suspended in schematic grids. Clouds, adrift, over a rubbed-pigment desert. 

The subjects of “CloudMapping” are not the specific places Yairi conjured in previous works. They are instead concepts, rendered from the vantage of non-concrete time.  In these drawings, Yairi gives form to the transience of representation, and indeed of the material world: Trees growing, harvested for lumber; towers, crumbling or not yet built; clouds, hanging then gone. Here, again, a remembrance of Cartier-Bresson. “For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.”

Observation Point / Yuval Yairi

In collaboration with: Paulina Witaszczyk

THE 31ST JEWISH CULTURE FESTIVAL / KRAKOW 2022
In “Maiseh”, which is the Yiddish word for tale (מייסע), seven legends are passed on in the public space. These tales are vehicles to grapple with loss, misfortune, betrayal and broken hearts. They arm us with humor, hope, courage and love. They bring us together.
Between June 25th and July 3rd, artists from Israel, Germany and Poland tell their version of legends from Krakow – in performances, drawings, murals, sound installations, workshops, and letters. Listen to these stories as they unfold in the streets of Kazimierz

MAISEH. A series of site-specific art projects >>>
Artists: Wojtek Blecharz, Hadassa Goldvicht, Cecylia Malik, Stefanie Oberhoff, Christoph Rothmeier, Kobi Vogman, Yuval Yairi
Curators: Curatorial Collective for Public Art (Berlin): Yael Sherill, Lianne Mol, Julia Kawka; HaMiffal (Jerusalem): Meydad Eliyahu; Jewish Culture Festival (Kraków): Paweł Kowalewski

This project is co-financed by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and the Goethe Institute Krakow


BEYOND THE GAZE

Group exhibition @Podbielski Contemporary, Milano. Opening March 22, 2022

Cypress Day 2 (detail)

BETWEEN THE LINES

Group show @ Fabienne Levy Gallery, Lausanne
February 24 – March 26 2022
With: Longinos Nagila, Aurélien Martin, Andrea Galvani, Daniela Edburg,
Vikenti Komitski, Norbert Bisky, Jorge Conde and Yuval Yairi



Paris Photo, 10-14/11/2021

Delighted to participate in Paris Photo 2021 with Podbielski Contemporary
Featuring Blurred Edges
– A dialogue between Giulio di Sturco , Loredana Nemes and Yuval Yairi
(10 November 2021: VIP Preview) Booth A27, Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris

© Yuval Yairi / Cloud Mapping #9534, 2021 / 50 x 70 cm

Feminine Difference – group exhibition @ Haifa Museum of Art

Opening: Saturday, 05.09.20, 10:00, until 31.12.20

Curator: Limor Alpern Zered

Yuval Yairi / Simon’s Secret, 2004 (from Forevermore)

The artistic and cultural discourse includes a broad discussion of womanhood and feminism – mostly concerning issues of the feminine body and the patriarchal gaze directed at it. Now – with many reports of violence against women during the coronavirus crisis – this issue has become more prominent and pressing.

This exhibition seeks to focus the viewers’ gaze on the domestic feminine space, which functions as a kind of “micro-territory.” It presents a spectrum of experiences, ranging from protection and intimacy to discomfort and subversiveness. Today we still live in a culture that delimits the experience of space according to gender. Like the woman’s body, her space is sensitive and vulnerable, defined by distinctions between inside and outside and by an organized system of acceptance and rejection, permission and prohibition.

The discussion of feminine space is related to Freud’s famous essay, “The Uncanny” (1919). This essay addresses the transformation of the familiar, intimate, and homely into a source of discomfort and strangeness that stirs fear and anxiety, precisely because of its familiar aspects. Freud, who identified the home with the maternal body, argued that the womb is nothing but the “gate to one’s old homeland […] the old, familiar feeling of homeliness, but also the sign of repression.” According to Freud, the womb is the main source of the polar opposition between the familiar and the strange, an opposition that threatens man’s identity. What was once homely and intimate becomes, for the child, mysterious and dark as he separates from the mother.

Feminist psychoanalytic discourse tends to see Freud’s essay in a critical light, since it excludes feminine experience, addressing only the world of the masculine subject. For women engaged in this discourse, processes of separation between mother and child and the consolidation of a separate sexual identity can be accompanied by feelings of compassion and respect, and not just anxiety and strangeness.

The works presented in this exhibition focus on the landscapes of the woman’s home and their physical and emotional contents – looking from the inside out and the outside in. The woman’s image is sometimes evident; at other times it is an absent presence. The works offer a profound contemplation of life itself – of spaces that suggest the ambivalence of closeness and strangeness, desire and fear, subject and object. They feature earthy yet symbolic objects, such as a bed, a sofa, windows, and various home utensils. These objects create an intimate and familiar scenery, while at the same time pushing us away, generating a tense and enigmatic atmosphere charged with different associations. The works sometimes offer a subversive reading that expresses the essence of womanhood in terms of liminal situations of instability and collapse in the most familiar places.

Participating artists: Hamutal Attar, Oded Balilty, Lilach Bar-Ami, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Martha Rieger, Angelika Sher, Inbal Waldman Ben, Yuval Yairi