Yael Kanarek |Melancholia | N&N Aman Gallery | 10.09.09 - 16.10.09 |

Melancholia is Yael Kanarek’s third exhibition with the gallery. In a series of text based works Kanarek explores the geopolitical and spiritual properties of languages. Laser cut from black and white sheets of rubber, Kanarek uses words and narratives in multiple languages to meticulously arrange them into relationships that draw on basic functions: love and hate, light and dense, connection and separateness.
Kanarek’s inquiries emerge from her interest in network cultures, particularly the internet and network technologies. Redefining the term authorship, she engages industrial materials and technology to write in space, physical and virtual, contemplating poetics of networks, trade and technology.
Melancholia inspired by Rilke’s poem “I love the dark hours of my being.”


1. Lemon, 2008
Rubber and loctite
Approx. 50 x 50 in / 127 x 127 cm
Lemon is a meticulous construction made from the word lemon in forty languages. Hundreds of words cut from rubber are glued together to form a surface that at once references topographic aerial view and domestic craft, specifically crochet. The work touches on the territorial properties of language. From Japan to Latin America through the Mediterranean, in these forty languages the word ‘lemon’ has a similar pronunciation. The word presents evidence of human activity: Trade, conquer and migration. Lemon includes the first line from the poem "Perfection" by Williams Carlos Williams. Williams’ apple is replaced with lemon: “Oh lovely apple lemon! Beautiful and completely rotten, [...]”
Dutch, Maltese, Afrikaans, Catalan, Galician, Papiamentu, Swahili, Thai, Bân-lâm-gú, Tongan, Irish, Albanian, Slovene, Wolof, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Bulgarian, Russian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Papago, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Old French and Old Italian, Farsi, Urdu, Hebrew, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Uyghur, Korean, and English.


2. Cut, 2007
Rubber, silver findings, pins, enamel paint and sculpy
Appx 6.5 x 12' / 2 x 3.65 m
I built Cut around the body of a friend. A tall man, his dimensions and circumferences are captured in the lengths of the silver chains. On the wall his dimensions in chains become a drawing. The narrative, in English, Arabic and Hebrew, links to Cut from Object of Desire, which describes an involuntary act of circumcision of the middle finger.

3.Kiss, 2007
Rubber, 892 pins
67.5" x 67.5" / 180 x 180 cm

Kiss is made of two transposed grids. The word Kiss appears in English, Arabic (qobla) and Hebrew (neshika). One grid of words hangs against the wall in the reading direction. The second grid of word hangs at the tip of the pins against reading direction. Thus the kisses breathe on each other at the distance of the pin. The words are organized spontaneously and form all nine possible combinations between the languages. The work is lit by several shades of white light to generate a third system of relationships that emerges from the overlapping shadows.



4.Orange, for Malevich, 2009
Rubber and loctite on wood
22 x 22 in / 55 x 55 cm
"Orange, for Malevich," is a dense mesh square that uses the word orange as a construction unit. In English it's the color and the fruit (thus the shape). In Yiddish and Arabic the fruit is suggested in the color and in Hebrew the color has its own word.
"I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism." - Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 1927

5. White/Binary, 2009
Rubber and loctite on wood
22 x 22 in / 55 x 55 cm

White/Binary is inspired by two spiritual sources. First, Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918. Malevich described his aesthetic theory, Suprematism, as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." The second source is a Talmudic commentary that suggests that an idea can exist in two contradicting states – be a truth and a parable at the same time. In popular quantum physics this can be translated into the state where an element exist as a particle and a wave at the same time.

White/Binary operates the mental space between the image received through our eyes and the mental picture conjured by words. It does so by utilizing contrast and relocation. The word, in four languages, English, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish, reads in black dense rubber the word ‘white.’ The composition frames a void in the center that hints at white. The rough, murky edges remind us that the borders between things are never concrete but exist in a state of flux and exchange. Thus, White/Binary is truth and a parable on white. White/Binary is also a fuzzy binary. Not a definite black and white. It proposes a cultural and geopolitical condition in which white is not exactly the opposite of black and white itself has multiple shapes and sounds.
White – English; Lavan – Hebrew; Weiss – Yiddish; Abiad - Arabic

5. White in White, 2009
Rubber and loctite on wood
22 x 22 in / 55 x 55 cm
White in White draws its title from Malevich’s painting White on White from 1918. He considered white as the color of infinity. In this work, the structure of the sunburst is comprised of the words yellow in the interior to red on the exterior, in four languages, the words mix into an imagined orange in the transition. The mental picture paints a bright intense sunburst, while the information passed to through the senses is a mass of whites. The colors yellow and red reference the love letter Cut from Object of Desire.


6. My Mondrian: Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 2009
Rubber and loctite on wood
20 x 20 in / 51 x 51 cm

The original Mondrian composition is recreated by the pigments titles Mondrian used in his painting (according to the restoration department at MoMA). The pigments cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, ultramarine, zinc white, lead white and bone black were translated and transliterated into four languages: English, Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew, out of black rubber. They were cemented together in mass to recreate the original compositions. These works draw attention to the physicality of the spiritual pursuit as pigments come through networks of trade and science and move in the multilingual landscape. The application is expressive and loose like crops, barriers and open fields.

7. My Mondrian: Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue, 2009
Rubber and loctite on wood
22 x 22 in / 55 x 55 cm

The original Mondrian composition is recreated by the pigments titles Mondrian used in his painting (according to the restoration department at MoMA). The pigments cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, ultramarine, zinc white, lead white and bone black were translated and transliterated into four languages: English, Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew, out of white rubber. They were cemented together in mass to recreate the original compositions. These works draw attention to the physicality of the spiritual pursuit as pigments come through networks of trade and science and move in the multilingual landscape. The application is expressive and loose like and arial topography of crops, and open fields.



8.Untitled (eye), 2008
Rubber, pins
115.5 x 109 in / 293.5 x 277 cm
A field of 1,155 rubber pieces of the word 'eye' in English, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish. The form is based on the shape created when separating Venetian blinds. The word in Hebrew and Arabic is exactly the same. Yiddish is written in Hebrew script but is a primarily old German dialect. The Yiddish word for eye is 'oig.'

For text and images doc pleasedownload the attached file :