Noa Yekutieli

Mountains of Narrative is an ongoing project through which Noa Yekutieli explores the composition and decomposition of various cultural histories in relation to the composition and decomposition of personal memories. Initiated in 2015, the project has evolved through continuous research, travel, documentation, and exhibition. Accordingly, Yekutieli has traveled to Israel, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Germany, China, and the US for research. In each new place she focuses on different research semantics that examine the intersection between historical narratives and the everyday. Reference travel images accumulate and are eventually integrated into the series of work that consist of papercutting, photography, and drawings and collages. Specific components from various images are cropped, overlapped and intersected within the same picture plane, assimilating elements from different places to create a new reality. Each research destination becomes a layer that forms a new hypothetical space composed of many different worlds in one.The layering and shifting between places allows a stratification of research, facts, and narratives, creating a space that is able to hold a juxtaposition of facts. Throughout the series, the recontextualization of images weaves different perspectives together as the project develops. Specifically, images of disasters, both natural and manmade, are employed by the artist to express collective experiences so strong they swallow up the tenderness, vulnerability, and significance of individual stories that eventually disappear into the totalizing abyss of universal experience. While wars and political conflicts radically alter the physical and psychical characteristics of a place, demolition also comes with the opportunity for a new, and better, reconstructed reality. Addressing the idea of "narrative", both as a biographical and political structure, Mountains of Narrative imports elements from various cultures to explore the dynamic nature of subjective narratives within the universal human experience.