Engaging with various mediums including site-specific installation, manual paper cutting, photography and drawing the Israeli-American artist, Noa Yekutieli, explores the notion of narrative formation. Through her unique technique of disassembly and assembly, Yekutieli constantly deals with the process of construction and deconstruction of narratives. The negative space of the paper cuts renders absence visible, attesting to a loss of information or misplaced memories. Mirroring the human desire for control, the paper cutting is a labor-induced effort that doesn't allow mistakes, it is an irreversible process that emphasizes and demonstrates irreversible destruction.
Coming from a multicultural background Yekutieli’s work often incorporates various inconsistent narratives from different cultural contexts that occupy a single space. By layering specific images of day to day human interactions, Yekutieli brings together various stories into a singular frame to examine how larger social and political structures affect the personal realm of empathy and emotion and vice versa. The focus of the work migrates from the personal to the collective and back again to the personal. By combining material from different contexts and places she seeks to create balance and stability through various formats of temporary homes and surfaces that allow recontextualization embodied with new meanings and narratives. The use of rubble of destroyed buildings in Yekutieli’s work challenges questions of how our society deals with physical rubble that once provided solid homes and now are no longer in need and use. The reconstruction from deconstructed homes allows her to explore the challenges and difficulties societies who are dealing with loss and trauma constantly go through in order to build a home. In the past year Yekutieli has been exploring the power dynamic that is held within the structure of the pedestal as an ‘invisible narrator’ which on the one hand, presents the artwork and documentation of our past but on the other hand, indicates and controls how our past will be viewed. By selecting only parts from the original sculptures and placing them on pedestals she examines how context has the power to change the meaning of objects across time. She rises to surface the selectivity in representation of who has the privilege to create ancient art and ideas of nationalism based on archaeology proves one has on a land. Through the pedestal, she questions current power-dynamics that still exist in the way things are displayed; In what form, material, technique and language they are created? What materials and techniques are considered craft vs. fine art? Who has the voice to narrate and document our time? Who decides what would be in the focus vs. the outskirts of society? From what point of time we read the history and in what context? Yekutieli aims to reshape the way we understand our shared past from the present standing point by placing on the pedestal fragmented ancient body parts. While paper usually performs as a surface upon which narratives manifest themselves, Yekutieli transformers it to the narrative itself. The once heavy sculptures are now black silhouettes detached from their original context and the stretching paper both connects and keeps them apart, seemingly upholding a weight it’s not strong enough to hold, as if time and space could collapse at any given moment. The dismantled human structure is a reminder of the temporary nature of existence, a fact that art often tries to conceal by creating everlasting artifacts that may stand for “everlasting structures”. Suggesting that Similar to our personal experiences, global history too has its ways of remembering and forgetting.
