Read text by Michal Helfman (IN ENGLISH)
Read text by Michal Helfman (IN HEBREW)
Gideon Ofrat – Yudkovik’s Poetry ( IN HEBREW)
Read Exhibition text (IN HEBREW)
An interview with Yael Yudkovik – Reut Barnea, Portfolio Magazine
To Host Life carries a double meaning. On one hand, it refers to a concrete action: hosting people, opening the door, and allowing others to enter one’s private space. On the other hand, it suggests a state of mind: to host life itself, to let it in. The exhibition moves within the tension between hosting people and hosting reality.
The current exhibition is a continuation of “My Death Came to Me Suddenly” (2023), Yael Yudkovik’s previous solo exhibition. If there, an imagined death stood at the center, an extreme possibility and a gaze toward the end, here a counter-movement toward life appears, not as a denial of that gaze, but as a response to life. The connection between the two exhibitions is also embedded in their titles, both formulated in the first person as an address to existence, once through the image of death, and now through an invitation to life.
The installation, in Yudkovik’s unique sculptural language, is composed of treated objects, seemingly still, that invite a dialogue with the viewer and seek to free themselves from the contexts attached to them. Among the objects are signs of hospitality: trays, a doormat, and a hat rack, alongside domestic materials.
The art field is a space in which subject and object exchange roles: the viewer becomes more passive, and the object acts. Instead of seeing the object as something seemingly inanimate, it can be thought of as an active entity, one that invites, seduces, and at times even “looks back,” becoming a covert partner in the viewer’s internal experience. In this sense, the objects themselves invite the viewer to hospitality.
During the exhibition weekends, we will host
The Georges
Echoes and Reflections on “To Host Life”
An ongoing Living Life event
Event Dates: Friday 8.5 // Saturday 9.5 // Friday 15.5 // Friday 22.5
Event hours: 11:00-14:00
George & George is a duo of performers who operate as a live event. Two entities perceived as one, freaks of creativity. They treat reality as a synchronized and continuous creative-conscious stream, processing and transforming everything they encounter.
About The Artist
Yael Yudkovik, born in Israel, lives, works, and teaches in Tel Aviv.
She served at Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) as an editor and producer of programs in culture, current affairs, and military and security affairs. She holds a B.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and continued her studies in psychology and social sciences at Tel Aviv University.
Her works combine a variety of creative mediums and are often based on biographical materials. A significant part of her artistic practice engages with memory, forgetting, and processes of identity formation. Many of her works include installations dealing with rupture, separation, and disappearance.
Many of the images in her work are based on metamorphoses and hybridizations between materials and forms. She engages with art history, the development of form, and both local and universal motifs. Her drawings and sculptures move between the abstract and the concrete. Through a combination of biographical experiences and formalist sculptural inquiry, she creates formal combinations and material contrasts that address identity and place, generating tensions between geometric, minimalist abstraction and the use of simple, everyday materials, including construction materials, readymade objects, and industrial products, which are sometimes manually and personally processed. A significant part of her works is created following encounters with discarded objects, raw materials, and fragments of the urban environment, which are transformed into works that combine industrial objects with studio-processed materials.
Following the Gaza War in the summer of 2014, Yudkovik joined the Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum. As part of the “Narrative” project in which she participated, meetings were held in Beit Jala between Israelis and Palestinians who had lost loved ones in the conflict. This deep engagement with the narratives of the other side served as the basis for her solo exhibition “The Annual Conference on the Prevention and Treatment of Pressure Sores,” presented at Chelouche Gallery in its former space.
Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and abroad, and some are included in public collections, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Some of her works are also held in private collections, including the Bandman Collection (Tokyo), the Serge Tiroche Collection, and others.
Yudkovik is the recipient of the Bezalel Excellence Award (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem), the Sharett Scholarship (America-Israel Cultural Foundation for Young Artists), the Award of the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport, the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Tel Aviv, the Mifal HaPais Council for Culture and Arts Award, the Israel Performance Artists Association Award, and the ArtLink Award, an international program for young artists under the auspices of Sotheby’s.