Yael Davids (1968, Jerusalem, Israel) includes installation, dance and narration in her performances. Indeed, her work is inspired by the different artistic fields she studied: Fine Arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), choreography at Akademie Remscheid (Remscheid) and sculpture at Pratt Institute (New-York). The elements used, which all have minimalist traits, create a rhythm in the space of the performance. Her minimalist gestures lead her to question the role of the artist in performances. She performs alone or in collaboration with other artists from various technical horizons.

She uses her personal experience as a tool to confront individual experience with social experiences, her own history and collective history [1]. For Davids, the body is a space of conflicts and contradictions, where private and public spheres are meeting one another. Yael Davids analyses the society's blueprint in confrontation with personal subjectivities. The collective and personal experiences result in the emergence of the self. Therefore, she defines norms and rules from the perspective of a specific social group. Through the narration of her emotions, she takes radical political stances [2]. The frames of her performances and positions are bodies, spaces or objects.

For Yael Davids, the narration is an essential part of documenting and teaching history. She analyses the ephemerality of individual memories. The mourning she experienced led her to give importance to the abstraction of language which is to her the closest way to narrate absence and loss. In her work, there is an important contradiction between presence and absence, movement and language.

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[1] Les laboratoires d'Aubervilliers. (2014) 'Yael Davids'.
Available at: http://www.leslaboratoires.org/artiste/yael-davids

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[2] La Ferme du Buisson. (2014) 'Yael Davids - A Variation on A Reading that Writes'.
Available at: http://lafermedubuisson.com/yael-davids_1