Outset Contemporary Art Fund Israel and the Tel Aviv Arts Council have partnered together to create the Young Artist Award, furthering their organisational missions to strengthen and celebrate the creative culture of Israel. Each year, the organisations will jointly support, highlight, and honour a young Israeli based artist who was not born in Israel – exploring the role of various cultures and perspectives in creating an authentic Israeli creative voice.
Specifically, the award’s grant will be used by the honoree to create a new gallery show of original works at a non-profit artistic institution. The Young Artist Award includes a 10,000 NIS grant towards original work in a public non-profit showing, local and international PR and marketing assistance, as well as exposure in the young international arts community in Israel.
The first award recipient is Noa Yekutieli who sees herself not as an artist but as a memory researcher. In her installation Through The Fog, The Distance she explores the fickle nature of memory through natural disasters which erase an entire physical reality, leaving only memories that gradually blur and dissolve to make room for a newly evolving reality. The disaster, however, is not the subject of her work, but only the frame story whereby the artist observes the resulting void, the locus whose absence we feel and strive to fill, the place which we miss.
The installation consists of three parts: the trail of ruins which symbolises the reality after the disaster, the white wall that stands for the void created when physical reality disappears and memories gradually fade, and 200 paper-cuts, hidden behind the wall, featuring excerpts from a reality now gone.
Through The Fog, The Distance is on view at the Wilfrid Israel Museum, Kibbutz Hazorea. Founded in 1951 the Wilfrid Israel Museum began life with a collection of Near and Far Eastern art bequeathed to the kibbutz by Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943), friend and patron of its young founders. Israel was one of the leading figures in the rescue of Jewish children and youngsters from Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. He died on a flight to England from Portugal, when his plane was shot down by the German Air-force.
Curators: Anat Turbowicz and Shir Meller Yamaguchi
A work by Noa Yekutieli was donated to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art collectively by the artist, the Tel Aviv Arts Council and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
