Noa Yekutieli (b.1989) acts as a researcher of memory that materializes her findings into visual art. Motivated by the drive to sweep viewers into both individual and collective streams of consciousness, Yekutieli employs a morphological debate that allows an intimate contemplation on both conscious and unconscious aspects of being, moving from past, current, and future at each given moment.
Yekutieli's main practice is installation works. Using technique of manual paper cutting, which she obtained through an autodidactic research of material the content of each work is subjected to a process of deconstruction and compilation. As her work focuses on questions of narrative and both subjective and social trauma, the paper cutting technique - as a play of substance and absents - correspond with the content, allowing it to develop further.
The foundation for each work is documentation. Using photography and employing press-images there is a shift from everyday moments to natural or man-made disasters; this shift enables me to explore occurrences of the formation of memory and the construction of narratives in different locations.
In deciding and pivotal moments of extreme hardship, memory enters a fickle state, transforming occurrences too hard to bare with vague traces. These events impel the construction of concise memories, and particularly as a given reality is abound with conflict. This is not to say that disasters in and of themselves are the main question, but rather how representation of catastrophe play as visual facts that sustain and negate human memory. They become an expression of insufferable locus of emptiness, but such that only their acceptance we are able to confront and learn from them.
The paper-cutting technique is an irreversible act. When positioned opposing to its betrothed glass frame, the relation between the monochromatic image and the glass surface create a constant, yet concurrently changing, substrate of reflections. The appearance of material as reflection stands as an invitation for participation and even interference of the viewer. The reflection also emphasizes the constant influence the surrounding gives rise to the relation between narrative and context, as they are placed in a juxtaposition. In her current undertaking ‘Mountains of Narratives’ these juxtapositions are further developed as she combines visual information, that was extracted as part of a cultural research, and placed in such a way to create an overlapping of instances - past and current - which become one.