Yael Davids: One Is Always a Plural
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
22 May - 5 September 2021
Horizontal – from image to movement,
Chart for the Feldenkrais lesson
with works from the collection, 2021
Collage, pencil and pen on paper
Courtesy the artist
Exhibition with works by Yael Davids in dialogue with Eleanor Antin, Phyllida Barlow, Heidi Bucher, Thea Djordjadze, Marlene Dumas, VALIE EXPORT, Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Ferdinand Hodler, Dorothy Iannone, Senga Nengudi, Luis Pazos, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Cathy Wilkes from the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and loans from the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation and Jon Mikel Euba.
For the exhibition One Is Always a Plural, artist Yael Davids has selected art from the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst’s collection to bring into dialogue with her own works. She engages with the institution and its collection in an unusual manner. The foundational ideas of the Feldenkrais Method play a key role in the design of the exhibition and selection of works. This holistic body-oriented technique believes that movement principles form the basis of every human action, and it aims to expand self-image through carefully performed movement sequences. Davids examines the potential of the Feldenkrais approach in a completely different area, in the experience of art. She invites visitors not only to “see” art but also to find another way of accessing it through body and movement.
The artistic practice of Yael Davids (*1968, Jerusalem) focuses on performative work using the body. Davids views the body as a vessel for personal and collective memories, as well as a place in which to intertwine individual and social narratives. The body is to be interpreted as a configuration of everything that exists within and outside of its own boundaries. It always exists in relation to its environment, both as a starting and an end point, and is heavily influenced by encounters with others: “one is always a plural.” In this sense, the exhibition is not a conventional solo show; rather, it brings together a variety of voices and positions – collection works, loans and works by Davids – in order to compile them and establish links between them. The artist’s own works serve to bring all of this together: on the one hand, they choreograph visitors’ movements, owing to how they are positioned, or open up different views of works, depending on the viewer’s perspective; on the other hand, her works serve as a structure that offers a platform for other voices and artistic positions.
Yael Davids’ approach to the museum and its collection is influenced by her intensive study of the Feldenkrais Method (she has been a Feldenkrais practitioner for many years). Moshé Feldenkrais (1904, Ukraine – 1984, Israel), a scientist and enthusiastic judoka, developed a method in the late 1940s based on the knowledge that people are capable of lifelong learning and changing. With this, he anticipated the existence of what is now known as “neuroplasticity.” The method developed by Feldenkrais is thus a body-oriented, therapeutic, and pedagogical practice in which specific movement sequences are carefully performed in order to help participants recognize their own movement habits and, in doing so, their ability to create a change. This allows users of this method to find and internalize alternatives to that which has become habitual or entrenched. The objective is not to perfect a certain “type” of movement, but to work with the possibilities of our own bodies and improve our functional movements – such as standing, sitting, bending and grasping.
One of Moshé Feldenkrais’s main concerns was to create a beneficial and supportive learning environment. Similarly, Yael Davids wants to establish the museum as a place for common learning: a body-oriented, “organic” type of learning shaped by curiosity and openness. The artist describes the act of learning as a profoundly emancipatory moment with a unique aesthetic form. For her, learning also contains the potential for each individual to change and expand – from one to plural. With this in mind, Davids has designed two rooms as a school where visitors are invited to participate in lessons, led by professional Feldenkrais teachers, over the course of the exhibition.
Over two weekends, Yael Davids will lead her own Feldenkrais lessons, which she has designed on the basis of works from the museum’s collection. She has examined artistic works for aspects such as orientation, stability, gravity, texture, etc., and transferred these intrinsic properties into corresponding Feldenkrais exercise sequences. This allows participants to experience the works in a new way: lying down with their eyes closed, guided by the artist, practicing in a group setting, moving their bodies. The aim here is not to rationally learn something about the works; rather, it is to learn from and with them. The charts produced by Yael Davids for each of these lessons serve as a script and educational instrument for the practice sessions. Here, relationships between works of art and Feldenkrais principles are shown in the form of image/text collages. To a certain extent, the charts are at the core of the exhibition, as they illustrate Davids’ artistic considerations, manifested, for example, in the spatial context of the art works. The works that Davids draws on in her Feldenkrais lessons were selected by museum employees with whom she had been regularly practicing Feldenkrais for a number of months prior to the exhibition; they can be viewed at the school space in the exhibition.
Yael Davids also based her exhibition concept on the work of Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), an Israeli dancer, choreographer and movement theorist who developed a system in the 1950s, together with Avraham Wachman (1931–2010), with a view to recording the movement of the human body and its organization in graphic form (known as Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation). A close friend of Moshé Feldenkrais, Eshkol was responsible for the transcription and notation of most of his lessons. At the exhibition, visitors can view a significant number of sketches, drawings and photographs from the Noa Eshkol Foundation’s archives, which are displayed in a cabinet created by Yael Davids and designed on the basis of the axes and spheres of the notation principle. For Davids, Eshkol, who consistently practiced collective living, working and learning, is an important reference both for her own work and for the exhibition at large.
By transferring questions and perceptions of bodily connections (which are essential to Feldenkrais teachings) into the context of artistic practice and the museum space, Yael Davids draws the focus away from the individual works of art and toward the reference points and lines linking them. The artist views the process of designing the exhibition as a key part of her project. For her, this is similar to writing a script for a performance, with the museum seen as the body and the collection as its backbone.
Yael Davids scrutinizes the conventions concerning the dissemination of knowledge by institutions; she shifts the parameters for experiencing art; and she allows visitors to join her in examining how increased self-awareness changes the way in which we approach the works of art, the exhibition and the museum.
The exhibition is curated by Nadia Schneider Willen (collection curator, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst); she was assisted by Marie-Sophie Dorsch (Trainee, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst). An iteration of the exhibition was first presented at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 2020, where it was initiated and curated by Nick Aikens (research curator, Van Abbemuseum). It was produced as part of Creator Doctus, a new research format launched by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, with Yael Davids as the inaugural “candidate.”
A workbook documenting the artistic research project and both exhibitions by Yael Davids will be published in September 2021. With contributions by Nick Aikens, Janine Armin, Frédérique Bergholtz, Jeroen Boomgaard, Yael Davids, Sher Doruff, Roobina Karode, Nadia Schneider Willen and Grant Watson. The publication is realized in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and is published by Roma Publishers.
Yael Davids lives and works in Amsterdam. Her works and performances have featured in the following exhibitions, among others: A Daily Practice (solo exhibition), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2020; Dying Is a Solo (solo exhibition), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2018; documenta 14, Athens / Kassel, 2017; La distance entre V et W (solo exhibition), Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, 2015; Gesture in Diaspora, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, 2015; Ending With Glass (solo exhibition), Kunsthalle Basel, 2011; Learning to Imitate in Absentia I (solo exhibition), Picture This, Bristol, 2011; Where Times Becomes Art, Palazzo Fortuny, performance division, Venice Biennale, 2005.
MIGROS MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich
