Yuval Yairi: 7 cool facts

Yuval Yairi (Hebrew: יובל יאירי‎; born 1961 in Tel-Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli artist, using photography and video. Yairi Studied visual communication at the WIZO College Haifa (1984-1988), was the director of a design studio in Jerusalem (1988-1999), produced and directed gruff films and documentaries until 2004. Since 2004 Yairi devotes his law to research and artistic activity, primarily in mediums of photography and video. The subjects of Yairi’s produce an effect relate to Places, and his gaze – whether it’s a historical place, cultural, personal or political – explores these places in context of memory. A Leper Hospital or a writer’s library, an isolated Arab village, a cheap hotel-room or a museum undergoing renovations – transform through his personal perspective, of deconstructing and recomposing spaces, times and events. Yairi’s works are exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals in Israel and abroad, and are in public and private collections.

Yairi is a recipient of The Ministry of Culture Award for Visual Arts, 2017

Yuval Yairi’s series “Forevemore” has been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Andrea Meislin Gallery in NYC in 2005.

Yairi photographs the leper home with a digital video camera in yet mode, constructing the image from hundreds (at grow old thousands) of frames. The pictures are taken in the course of several hours, during which the player slowly and cleverly documents all detail in the tone from a single position, like the viewer’s observation movement on entering the space. He selects details which he then combines into a unquestionable unified photographic image containing a loads of information, one that no single nevertheless photograph can contain. Thus, in fact, Yairi overcomes the temporal and spatial limitations of welcome photography. _{from exhibition text, Tel Aviv Museum.}

Yuval Yairi’s “Palaces of Memory” series has been exhibited at Alon Segev Gallery in 2007, and in New York at Andrea Meislin Gallery, 2008.

The Cage and the Bird “A cage went in search of a bird” wrote Kafka Kafka : a photographic structure went out into the world in search of motifs that would combat it. The result is the heart of this exhibition. The world can be perceived as “at once,” as one, absolute, indivisible thing. But it can then be thought of as the sum of an infinite numbers of parts. So it is past everything, small or large: the world exists both as “one” (the absolute) and as a cumulation of an infinity of units. It is this duality that Yuval Yairi’s photographs try to capture. They are on all, at one and the thesame time, a collection of fractions, and a whole. They represent these two states of being – like water attempting to be vapor and ice at one and the same time. The “thickening of time” results from the image of the “art of memory,” from which Yairi sets out to make his recent series of photographs, following in the pathway of Simonides of Ceos (556-468 B.C.E), the Greek poet considered to be the father of mnemonics (the art of aiding memory). Simonides’ method of remembering is based on the “translation” of abstract concepts into genuine objects and their imaginary placement in a space skillfully known to the memorizer, based upon the assumption that genuine images are easier to recall than abstract ideas. Thus, for example, a poem can be translated into a series of mnemonic images that can be installed in the home of the memorizer. The exploit of remembering involves a mosey through the house, and the deposit of visual “reminders” along a known path.

Yuval Yairi is represented by Fabienne Levy Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland