The Israeli-American artist Noa Yekutieli explores the notion of narrative formation by engaging various mediums including site-specific installation, manual paper cutting, photography, and drawing. Through disassembly and assembly, Yekutieli explores time, decay, and restoration via a cultural and personal lens. The negative space of the paper cuts renders absence visible, attesting to a loss of information or misplaced memories. Mirroring the human desire for control, the paper cutting is a labor-induced effort that doesn't allow mistakes, it is an irreversible process that emphasizes and demonstrates irreversible destruction.

While quarantined in Los Angeles without access to her studio, Noa Yekutieli developed an installation titled The Chaos in Order that slowly spread along the walls and ceiling of her home. What began as a way to clock the days during quarantine grew into an immersive installation based on a photograph of her studio that reformed the room’s dimensions, like a portal into a pseudo landscape. Photographs are juxtaposed along paper-cut images of upside down trees, collapsed ruins, troops, and abstract residue depicting different scenes; like a tapestry that encompasses different points of tension while bearing witness to one historical event unfold. Various narratives are contained within a singular piece of paper, presenting a multi-layered reality; an artwork inside an artwork. The dichotomy between the digital process versus the laborious manual paper cutting technique strikes a tension between two modes of perception, a reflection on a world that became an image of its old self.

Noa Yekutieli (b. 1989) lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel and Los Angeles, California.

Her work has been shown at the Augsburg Kunstverien, Germany; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, China; Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel; The Israeli-Palestinian Pavilion, Nakanojo Biennale, Japan; Open Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan; Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel; Artist House, Tel-Aviv, Israel; and at the Wilfrid Museum, Israel. And has held solo exhibitions in various galleries such as Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Gisela Clement, Bonn, Germany; Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, Germany.

She is a recipient of the Sommer Frische Knust residency in Austria; the Taipei Artists Village; the Gottesman Etching Center Residency in Israel; Reciprocity, Asylum Arts, Los Angeles, California; and the Fundacao Atre e Cultura in Luanda Angola.

Yekutieli received the Young International Artist award by OUTSET and the Israeli Lottery Council grant. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art, The Marrakech Museum for Photography and Visual Arts, and various international private collections.

This year she will be participating in the 14th A.I.R Biennale: An A-historical Daydream, curated by Jasmine Wahi, Brooklyn, New York; RESET exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Ahlen, Germany; and Impersonating Myself/Becoming Myself at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum, China.

Crew Credits:

Production:
Creator and Executive Producer - Hernán Díaz Alonso
Producers - Marcelyn Gow/Reza Monahan
Director of Photography - Sean Meredith
Additional Videography - Yoni Shrira

Post-Production:
Story Producer - Vivian Charlesworth
Editors - Cal Crawford/Reza Monahan

Additional Images and Video Courtesy of Noa Yekutieli and Track 16 Gallery

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