Topography / Yair Barak
The act of marking, the indexical voting, and the creation of archives are all at the foundation of modernist artworks.
Yael Yudkovik exhibits pairs of bicycle wheels. In line with the ready-made tradition, see Duchamp, she converts the object’s functional role within the symbolic dimension. Beyond the rims of the wheels are two pairs of balls, wrapped together like a pair of testicles, made of antique maps of Israel, upon which Yudkovik has drawn the limits of her map of Israel (invented, fictitious) and thus mimics the familiar boundaries.
The map, which is an abstraction of a multidimensional reality, seems here to be an allegory of the artist’s act of abstraction. The symbolism of this work creates a system of signs that enable (or not) the reading of the work from the inside out, and vice versa. Likewise, the map offers a possibility for reading and understanding, but like all sets of knowledge, it always becomes an opaque code shrouded in secrecy.
Yael Yudkovik: “I draw lines and new areas with charcoal and graphite pencils on ancient maps of Palestine. I add and erase border lines, roads, routes, highways, water systems, the flow of rivers.
Dark patches turn into a continent, perhaps a sea”.
“Am I, by erasing and cancelling existing borders, or adding new ones, engaging in an act of occupation, or creating new territories?”
