In her installation Through The Fog, The Distance Noa Yekutieli 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 symbolizes the reality after the disaster; the white wall that stands for the void created when physical reality disappears and memories gradually fade; and some 200 paper-cuts, hidden behind the wall, featuring excerpts from a reality now gone.
Yekutieli intentionally selected a wide range of disasters from diverse geographical and cultural loci to accentuate the dimension of universality. Although each disaster as such is local, together they constitute a universal experience which elicits identification and compassion, generating a common denominator, a collective memory for people from different physical, emotional, and historical places.
She orchestrates an intentional dissonance between a raw material and a delicate technique, between overt and covert, visible and invisible, between excess and absence, thereby invoking discomfort which burdens the senses and prevents experiencing the work as a whole. Yekutieli thus takes us out of our comfort zone, making us reconsider the workings of memory.
