The Annual Conference on the Prevention and Care of Pressure Ulcers
Yael Yudkovik
2019
The catalog "The Annual Conference for the Prevention and Treatment of Pressure Ulcers" accompanied Yael Yudkovik's solo exhibition, which was presented in 2019 at the Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv. The installation dealt with physical and mental pressure ulcers caused by limited movement or prolonged immobility. The pressure ulcer served as a metaphor for a conscious and spatial state of stagnation, characteristic of both Israeli and Palestinian societies, and hinted at the need for movement or change.
Yael Yudkovik is a member of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum. She took part in the "Narrative" project, which organized meetings between Israelis and Palestinians who had lost loved ones in the conflict. These meetings served as a starting point for her to become acquainted with narratives from the other side. During the exhibition, a special gathering was held, during which twenty Palestinian members of the Forum received a one-time permit from the Security Services to enter Israel for the purpose of visiting the gallery. For most of them, this was their first visit to Tel Aviv and to a contemporary art gallery. The catalog also refers to this event and documents its significance within the broader context of the exhibition.
In some of the objects, Yudkovik incorporated texts in Arabic, which, for most visitors creates a sense of illegibility and alienation. Some are based on sentences she herself wrote and had translated into Arabic. Other texts include proverbs and folk sayings originally formulated in the masculine form and addressed to men. Yudkovik converted them into the feminine form.
- Design: Gila Kaplan
- Texts: Sharron Hass, Tali Tamir, Ayat Abou Shmeiss, Dr. Gili Liviatan, Yael Yudkovik.
- Translation: English translation: Safra Nimrod / Arabic translation: Reem Ghanayem
- Language editing: Anat Aviv
- Copies: 250
- Pages: 168
- Type of binding: Hard cover
- Dimensions (cm): 16.5*23.5
- Reproductions: Photographs: Liat Elbling ,Tal Nisim, Elad Sarig / Photos of meeting with Palestinians at the gallery Michal Revivo
- Printing: A.R. Printing Ltd
- Binding: A.R. Printing Ltd
- Type of printing: offset
- Publication: Chelouche Gallery
- Place of publication: Tel Aviv-Jaffa
- Supported by: Orna Reshef and Tzali Reshef, rivka saker, Chelouche Gallery, Professor Izhak Schnel.
- Book photography: יאיר מיוחס
Yael Yudkovik is a multidisciplinary Israeli artist working in the fields of installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography. During her military service, she served as an editor and producer at Galei Tzahal (Army Radio), focusing on culture, current affairs, and military and security issues. She holds a BA in art from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and later studied psychology and social sciences at Tel Aviv University. She lives, works, and teaches in Tel Aviv.
Yudkovik combines diverse creative channels, often interwoven with biographical materials. Her work maintains a continuous dialogue with themes of death, memory, and forgetting, moving between acknowledgment of finitude and an ongoing attempt to defer it through visual strategies and illusions. The examination of loss and of the way it shapes identity plays a central role in her work. She operates through mechanisms of hybridization, transformation, and disruption, in dialogue with both local and universal visual sources and with the historical discourse of art. By linking biographical experiences and formalist sculptural inquiry, she creates disruptions and paradoxes that touch on fundamental questions of identity and place.
The works she creates are based on unexpected connections between materials, forms, and objects: sometimes between a ready-made and an element created in the studio, or between two found objects, and other times leaving the object as is, without intervention. In her works, tensions are created between geometric and minimalist formal abstraction and everyday materials, building materials, and ready-made objects.
