Noa Gur

"By using her own body as a ‘model’, Noa Gur digs back into the traditional relation of (male) artist and female (naked) object. In Painting on All Fours, she hangs her own body in a gallery. The female body is no longer depicted and represented by the artistic gaze, but instead exposed directly to the public. By leaving black traces on the gallery wall, the work brings back into the gallery what is not allowed into the cleanly world of the white cube, the market of pure exchange value: waste and filth, and thus the exclusion of people who work with their own dirty hands."

Karin Harrasser

"By using her own body as a ‘model’, Noa Gur digs back into the traditional relation of (male) artist and female (naked) object. In Painting on All Fours, she hangs her own body in a gallery. The female body is no longer depicted and represented by the artistic gaze, but instead exposed directly to the public. By leaving black traces on the gallery wall, the work brings back into the gallery what is not allowed into the cleanly world of the white cube, the market of pure exchange value: waste and filth, and thus the exclusion of people who work with their own dirty hands."

Karin Harrasser

Burning Bush shows the artist's face painted black with soot. The mouth inhales and exhales smoke. The face, which at first appears to be a flat, black surface, is partly lit and reveals its contours. By alluding to industrial means of production the work points towards the artist's labor and the problematic status of the female body as a represented object. One could also have the impression that the face is consuming itself by inhaling and exhaling: A self-sufficient circle of production and indulgence in a contemporary artist's life.

Burning Bush shows the artist's face painted black with soot. The mouth inhales and exhales smoke. The face, which at first appears to be a flat, black surface, is partly lit and reveals its contours. By alluding to industrial means of production the work points towards the artist's labor and the problematic status of the female body as a represented object. One could also have the impression that the face is consuming itself by inhaling and exhaling: A self-sufficient circle of production and indulgence in a contemporary artist's life.

"The second part of White Noise inverts the white cube and the process of self-portrayal: Here the 'white' face appears gradually from a pitch dark ground as the soot is removed by the paper towels. This evokes a great heterotopia of modern art: the cinema with its analogies of film and skin. It tells about the procedure of exposing a sensitive material to light. It also tells about the fact that early film coatings were not made sensitive enough to capture black faces; they were optimised for white faces only. Film began – in a very technical sense – as a white medium fit into a black, velvet-like cube."

Karin Harrasser