If I Was Body

14.2.25 - 28.6.25

Group exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art.

Curated by Irena Gordon

The exhibition If I was Body brings together artists who explore the fragility and incompleteness of the body in all its physical and psychological, human and nonhuman manifestations. It is a body currently immersed in an existential struggle, but it's being is imbued with the memory and history of things. Despite its physicality, it is an abstract spirit and consciousness, a corpus of speech and thought embedded in matter.

Yakira Ament’s new body of work "Echoes", created over the past year, emerged from the drawing Mud and Smoke (2022), now joined by two new Sprout (2024) drawings, together forming a triptych of a primordial storm. Alongside these liquid dream drawings she has created an array of two-three-part sculptures—totems of fertility or spell casting/removal. The names of the works reflect on the materials from which the works were made—drawings and sculptures that resemble bodies in the process of constant creation, before the separation of darkness and light, earth and heavens. These fantastic, mysterious sculptures—hybrids of nature and culture, beast and human—harbor explosive energies. In their movement between figuration and abstraction, and between order and chaos, they evoke the creatures populating Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal (Ideal Palace), holding up a mirror to the yearning of the human soul.
Ament explores the physical-metaphysical transformation of form and matter, tracing cyclical processes of renewal and deconstruction. The works bear the imprints of the hands that created them, the processes of their formation as bodies in progress, embodying an urgency for expansion and continuity.