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Yoav Shmueli // Tom
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Yoav Shmueli Born (1968) and lives in Israel. Recent group exhibitions: Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art (2003), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (First Decade of the Gottesdiener Prize, 2005), Haifa Museum of Art (2008), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2008).

This image features a guard tower in one of Israel’s best-known prisons; its “advertisement” on a billboard represents the prison by means of a highly specific and concrete element. This architectural structure, which may well be said to embody the spirit of modernity, is transformed into a mute sculpture, a silent building that highlights its own post-minimalist attributes. Nevertheless, the image is unable to disentangle itself from the tower’s violent social and historical context. Located beside the prison wall, the tower inscribes itself into a matrix of generic signs anchored in reality and in local mythology, and assimilated into Yoav Shmueli’s personal history.

Photograph: Inbal Abergil