Collaborative Art in Israel: The Case of Zik Group
Noa Avron Barak, PhD. Candidate, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
The proposed talk will examine the artistic practices of collaborative work in Israel, which the national canonic narrative marginalizes. However, I claim that collaborative art in Israel is central to the local culture as Israel was founded as a country of immigrants seeking to reinvent their lost communities by social collaboration. My lecture will focus on the first decade of the Zik group—an art collective established in Israel in 1985 and still active to this very day. I will perform a close analysis of Drosophila 1, a group’s performance from 1990, in which they collaboratively produced a huge-scale, site-specific wooden construction of “The Fly” later to be burned in a temporal live performance. Furthermore, in 1990, the members of the group first entered a joint studio in Jerusalem and also registered as a nonprofit organization called "Zik for Visual Art", which presented their aspirations to social change through collaborative art practice. I will show that Zik’s work values the collective mind and body (of the artists and of their audience) as the heart of contemporary art making. Their collaborative art practice undermines the traditional Western paradigm of the individual artist presenting the worshipped and unique artwork to an anonymous viewer, by changing the relationship between art maker(s) and audience and creating new kinds of social relations in the artistic and social sphere.