Uriel Ziv Azancot

Statement

We live in an era of screens, surrounding us constantly throughout our days, throughout our lives, a plethora of electronic devices is engulfing us in the public sphere as well as the private one, in the street, and in our own pockets.

The personal screens we all own contain within in them – in their digital memories, cloud storages, and social network databases – fractures of our multiple identities. Identities that are constantly constructed and reconstructed, copied, pasted, transformed and transfigured in the various online media platform in which we engage with.

As an artist I am fascinated by this connection between man and screen, a connection that is both physical as well as metaphysical. The physical aspects can be demonstrated by bodily engagements – the hand engages with the smartphone; the finger engages with the screen; our facial expression engage with the camera as we take a selfie. The metaphysical aspects are somewhat more elusive, but just as present – the mirror reflection on a “black” switched off screen; the metamorphosis that undergoes the character between the moment of the photograph snapshot to the moment in which it is exhibited and manifested in social media; the duel identity and presence of a person both in a physical spatiotemporal realm as well as a representational virtual cyber realm.

These aspects take a stronger hold in me, as I recollect my youth in an extremely orthodox Jewish house hold. A house hold with no computer, no television, no expression of the new technology but rejection and general fear. This blockade enforced on me by the educating figures in my early life has driven me towards a total fascination with these forbidden screens.

Bild: “Follow the Leader” (2016), Mix media, ready-mades, electric motor. (Picture by Nati Azenkot)