Yael Davids

Yael Davids’s exhibition “One Is Always a Plural” offers a subtle guide to expanding our perception by employing all bodily senses. As a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method who has intensively studied the work of the dancer and choreographer Noa Eshkol, Davids is not interested in replicating structures of knowledge transfer that come from a single source; as she understands it, an object never exists exclusively for itself, but only in relation to other things. Accordingly, the artist transforms the venue into a set of different architectural dispositions, creating spatial relations between her own work and selected pieces from the collection of the Migros Museum. Interventions like Leaning glass and black pigmented clay with Ferninand Hodler, 2021, and Hanging glass and pigmented clay with Senga Nengudi, 2021, require the visitors to use their whole body to experience the newly generated and highly suggestive frames of reference.

We are led through the space by Vanishing Point, 2020, meter-long lengths of hung fabric reminiscent of bandages or shrouds, which serve at once as walls, room dividers, and membranes. We slow down when passing Thea Djordjadze’s untitled 2011 arrangement of painted glass panels, which come together as if a frail piece of furniture. We tiptoe around tiny objects distributed on the floor between the weathered sunbeds of Cathy Wilkes’s Our Misfortune, 2001, which appear like barrows left behind on a battlefield. We lower our gaze toward Davids’s Lying black pigmented clay with Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, 2021, with its clay plates set on the floor like tombstones. We raise it toward the protagonist of Ferdinand Hodler’s painting Gärtner (The Gardener), 1896, who appears like a gravedigger.

The political is not explicit in Davids’s works. Instead, they gently touch upon personal and collective memories, letting us participate in the artist’s quest to understand how cultural legacies become imprinted on our bodies.