Writing the Text for the Curator

Combining video with performance, Shay-Lee Uziel presents a comic take on the encounter between the artist’s creative processes and the financial mechanisms of the art world. Between success and failure. Between an exhibition that is currently on view and the moment it is repacked and goes back into the studio. The work shifts between the coordinates outlined in the agreement between the artist and the art institution: hereafter, “the artist,” “the curator,” “the exhibition,” and “the viewers.” All four are actors in the economic system. The video follows the process of taking down the artist’s solo exhibition at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. The functional actions of dismantling shift from the biographical to the imaginary and fantastical. The work’s soundtrack is a phone call in which the exhibition curator asks the artist to take down his exhibition, since it does not “attract” visitors and people do not even go into his installation piece. The video is interspersed with short excerpts featuring the artist as a belly dancer. Like in a daydream, the figure dances amid the ruins of the installation, simultaneously awkward and full of pathos. The video is accompanied by a live performance of an ongoing artist talk. The talk and the encounter with the public preserve the energy of the old work, which was in fact taken down over a decade ago.