The Art to Survive
Impulse, instinct, wild, edge, gut feeling, necessity, animalistic - these are only part of the words I use to describe the essence of the exhibition The Art to Survive and the concept behind it. Art is survival and surviving as an artist is a nature. Sometimes it may feel as if the art to survive isto let life tame you, to surrender, to yield. Others survive differently: they fight, for themselves or
for others. Some survive through hope, withdraw into a cave; some survive inside their bubble. I’ll go back there in a minute, to the quietude of repression. But just before the body embraces the worn and weary familiarity, a new reality - forgotten, primitive, stinging - hurls me onto the hardness of “survival”; the ruthless, lost animal, that appears to bite, has been nesting inside of
me for a while, leaving its marks. There’s no getting used to it, there’s no caressing it. It is pulling me with a leash and I’m behind it, galloping. Saying “Aza 13” raises a political association, yet it’s impossible to disconnect it from the personal experience. When the reality outside penetrates the daily routine and disrupts it, there is no doubt: the offence is personal. I have been searching for the artwork that portrays this notion, the one that immediately exposes itself, that presents questions that cannot be
answered, the one you can absorb directly, without a need for interpretation. The one that is in a constant state of survival, that hasn’t got the time to tell a story, that pulls you into its flames and forces you to inhale the scorched smell
it leaves behind. --- Yehezkel Lazarov