THIS WEEK’S MUSE
YISHAY GARBASZ
“By working with marginalized communities and in areas affected by war and disaster, I am engaged in a continual process of making the invisible visible, making the unsightly tenderly seen.”
Yishay Garbasz is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, performance art and installation art. Trauma and the inheritance of post-traumatic memory are central to her art practice, as are issues of identity and the invisibility of trans women.
Her work finds significance in framing the passing of time, often using it as a vehicle for narrative. In In my Mother’s Footsteps, Garbasz documented her mother’s journey to a Nazi extermination camp, recording the number of steps her mother took and detailing the process through photographs.
She is drawn to borders—frontiers of mind and body—imagined and experienced. Her exploration took her to demilitarized zones designed to keep peoples, and people, apart. The border of North and South Korea, the peace lines that partitioned Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the “separation fence” created to constrain Palestinians in the West Bank – places that were all visited and photographed.
For Garbasz, the borders of gender, the limits of memory, and the “mirror inside you” are also revealed in these liminal places. Sometimes she is there to scrutinize the revelations, other times to test or disregard them. Always to make a new personal discovery.
Her images are distinguished by an unexpected beauty and their paradoxical focus on a different kind of border—an emotional and personal one—between the seen and the unseen. For her 2011 Numbers Project, Garbasz branded her forearm with the number that had been tattooed on her mother in Auschwitz. The brand eventually healed and faded from sight, emblematic of the distinction between a vicarious memory of her mother’s experience and her mother’s own memories. The border between these two memories was exposed, making the “invisible visible.”
Garbasz has lived and worked in Berlin since 2005 and has exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America.
“You have to deal with your story. Know what it is. Then you can see others because it’s like a mirror inside you that you have to polish. And only in the mirror inside you can you see outside of yourself.”
HAPPENING
Saturday, May 14, at 5pm
Ron Williams & Friends Present Music from the Great American Songbook
Performing music and songs from the Great American Songbook
$25