Still Standing: The Dancing Queens of Denmark, 2023
Site specific installation at Artport, Tel Aviv, Israel
Kindly supported by Statens Kunstfond and Artport
80 hand sewn plastic coated inkjet prints and textile tape
45 X 35 X 1 cm (each)
Kindly supported by Statens Kunstfond and Artport
80 hand sewn plastic coated inkjet prints and textile tape
45 X 35 X 1 cm (each)
From the exhibition catalog:
Yinon Avior's photography distorts and alters the images he captures: he crops, cuts, sutures, and laminates his images to create a made–up, makeshift work of art, queer in its nature and its interpretations. In Still Standing: Dancing Queen Denmark, Avior has taken hundreds of images of bikers coming to a momentary halt, extending one foot to balance on the pavement. Pictured from ground level, behind the bikers, he focuses on this moment of tension, in which one seeks to find solid ground but is simultaneously preparing to depart—an allegory for the uncertainty of the migratory experience.
The sewn–together images create a quilt–like aesthetic in an immersive installation, whose goal is not to be contained by a single wall but to “spread”, with all its connotations related to virality and queer history. Avior creates a link between the experience of migration and queer aesthetics, commenting on the ambiguity that accompanies departure and the efforts required to put oneself together again after a traumatic event.
Dr. Yarden Stern
Yinon Avior's photography distorts and alters the images he captures: he crops, cuts, sutures, and laminates his images to create a made–up, makeshift work of art, queer in its nature and its interpretations. In Still Standing: Dancing Queen Denmark, Avior has taken hundreds of images of bikers coming to a momentary halt, extending one foot to balance on the pavement. Pictured from ground level, behind the bikers, he focuses on this moment of tension, in which one seeks to find solid ground but is simultaneously preparing to depart—an allegory for the uncertainty of the migratory experience.
The sewn–together images create a quilt–like aesthetic in an immersive installation, whose goal is not to be contained by a single wall but to “spread”, with all its connotations related to virality and queer history. Avior creates a link between the experience of migration and queer aesthetics, commenting on the ambiguity that accompanies departure and the efforts required to put oneself together again after a traumatic event.
Dr. Yarden Stern
Installation view
Installation view
Still Standing: Dancing Queen of Denmark, 2023
Hand sewn plastic coated inkjet prints and textile tape
45 X 35 X 1 cm
Installation view
Installation view
Suicidal Cough, 2017
Video camera, projector and smoke machine
A camera documents its own footage projected through smoke in complete darkness. The footage is the projector’s light beam which becomes visible as a result of the smoke in the space. Due to the smoke’s movement, the projection which is also the photographed subject, moves constantly and therefore un-documentable. The impossible visual cross, which puts both camera’s and projector’s sensors in shock, creates an ecstatic noisy projection that is trapped in itself.
Installation view
Installation view
00, 2013
Various interventions in and out of a public toilet restroom
Merging blue restroom lighting with the brightly painted bands marking public bomb shelters, the installation brings together two architectural strategies that regulate behavior. The work examines how color operates as a spatial tool, directing, discouraging, and governing the bodies architecture anticipates.
A belt of red paint marked the space as a safe zone
All the lights inside were replaced with blue neon lights
The windows were blocked with wood
The neon lights was blue both in and out of the toilet stalls
Installation view
BLU, 2012
Empty metal lottery poster holders
80 X 50 X 4 cm each
80 X 50 X 4 cm each
BLU is an installation consisting of an empty room surrounded by blue-painted lottery boards taken from kiosks. Before each major lottery draw, large posters announcing the potential jackpot are placed inside these frames. To avoid wasting paint on a surface that will soon be covered, the lottery company leaves the center of each board unpainted. This practical economic decision produces an accidental abstract composition: a blue frame surrounding an empty center.
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Ashes and Dust, 2013
From the exhibition catalog:
Yinon Avior has been concerned with dust since childhood. He attributes this preoccupation to a cleanliness anxiety, and has used his art on occasion as a means of coping with the presence of dirt and disorder. The series of works exhibited here was created while he was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art: He carefully arranged on sheets of paper a mixture of dust and cigarette ash he picked up in the academy's halls, affixing it with transparent sticky tape. This repetitive act of constrained staining, as well as the tension between the pristine background and the pieces of dirt, project onto the white paper the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion, chaos and control. Like a scientist observing cells through a microscope or a child entranced by the dust motes dancing in a light beam, he contemplates with a sense of wonder this capsule encompassing leftovers of artistic activity and human existence. In his words, it is composed of "memory-bearing particles which, like DNA, carry within them the hereditary freight of life and death." Avior's family has its roots in Berlin, and the dust he collected on German soil has a special personal significance for him: in "Ashes and Dust" he hints at his family's history and at the culture that nurtured a regime of cleanliness which culminated so chillingly in the doctrine of "ethnic purity."
Dr. Tami Manor-Friedman
Yinon Avior has been concerned with dust since childhood. He attributes this preoccupation to a cleanliness anxiety, and has used his art on occasion as a means of coping with the presence of dirt and disorder. The series of works exhibited here was created while he was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art: He carefully arranged on sheets of paper a mixture of dust and cigarette ash he picked up in the academy's halls, affixing it with transparent sticky tape. This repetitive act of constrained staining, as well as the tension between the pristine background and the pieces of dirt, project onto the white paper the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion, chaos and control. Like a scientist observing cells through a microscope or a child entranced by the dust motes dancing in a light beam, he contemplates with a sense of wonder this capsule encompassing leftovers of artistic activity and human existence. In his words, it is composed of "memory-bearing particles which, like DNA, carry within them the hereditary freight of life and death." Avior's family has its roots in Berlin, and the dust he collected on German soil has a special personal significance for him: in "Ashes and Dust" he hints at his family's history and at the culture that nurtured a regime of cleanliness which culminated so chillingly in the doctrine of "ethnic purity."
Dr. Tami Manor-Friedman
Ashes and Dust, 2013 – Installation view from Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem
Ashes and Dust, 2013 – Installation view from Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem
Ashes and Dust, 2011
Ashes, dust and clear tape on paper
29.7 X 21 cm
Ashes and Dust, 2011
Ashes, dust and clear tape on paper
29.7 X 21 cm