Sivan Rajuan Shtang - Natural Worker Leor Grady

A minimalist yet razor sharp voice emerges from the recent works of Leor Grady. This voice is inscribed with traces of a battle left behind by an invisible body that demands severance of the actual body queer, Mizrahi, Yemenite, traditional and from a symbolic body national, modern, western, and artistic. Gradys figurative images are measured. When they appear as in Untitled (Pieta), 2005; Untitled (with Parents), 2007; Untitled (Marks), 2009; Untitled (Posters), 2013; Untitled (Cesar), 2013 they are the figure of this body; which Israeli culture in general, and Israeli art in particular, represses, displaces, excludes, and overlooks unable to recognize or come to terms with the consequences of its appearance neither in the symbolic artistic realm, nor in local visual culture.

Grady disrupts the narrative of the national body by making images in which Zionist hegemonic history is released from its traditional boundaries and binary categorizations: modernism vs. tradition, nationalism vs. religion, heterosexuality vs. homosexuality, Hebraism vs. Arabism. Not only do these images present a new pre or post national symbolic relationship, they also neutralize the hegemonic monopoly on the excluding and classifying act itself.

Each one of Gradys works contributes to the articulation of a new language that dismantles and reassembles relations between discourses, traditions and visual practices, materiality, literariness and language, shaking up a political culture that began 150 years ago, at the end of the 19th century, with the arrival in Palestine of European and Yemenite Zionists. Grady revives this history, as well as its traces in the framework of pioneering institutional art Bezalel in the early 20th century and asks us to question the source of hierarchies and political relations between sexuality, gender, race, and nationality in Israel and in Zionist culture at large. His cultural objects invite the missing body to now recall its historical violence, histories both erased, and yet to be created. The works act simultaneously with the Zionist viewpoint and against it. They feed and deprive it of its imagined power, ruin its ideological bases by dismantling discursive constructs, language, and Zionist visuality, and provide it with a new image.

The interdisciplinary aspect of his conceptual works in various media sculpture, video, and drawing, along with his poetic use of everyday objects, familiar images, materials and traditional techniques (such as embroidery, using olive oil and gold) forms a visual language fully committed to the history of art, which is at the same time totally independent. This juxtapositioning enables a powerful viewing experience combining scent, texture and materiality, while at the same time connecting tradition to intimacy, the white cube to the home, politics to poetics, and grandeur to the body.

Grady has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions at places including The Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Art, Ashdod Art Museum, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Y Gallery, Exit Art, Apexart and The Center for Book Arts in New York City and Magasin - Centre National dArt Contemporain, Grenoble, FR.

Sivan Rajuan Shtang