Yuval Yairi is an Israeli artist, using photography and video. Yairi Studied visual communication at the WIZO College Haifa, was the director of a design studio in Jerusalem, produced and directed short films and documentaries until 2004. Since 2004 Yairi devotes his work to research and artistic activity, primarily in mediums of photography and video. The subjects of Yairi's work relate to Places, and his gaze - whether it's a historical place, cultural, personal or political - explores these places in context of memory. A Leper Hospital or a writer's library, an abandoned Arab village, a cheap hotel-room or a museum undergoing renovations - transform through his personal perspective, of deconstructing and recomposing spaces, times and events. Yairi's works are exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals in Israel and abroad, and are in public and private collections. Yairi is a recipient of The Ministry of Culture Award for Visual Arts, 2017 Yuval Yairi's series "Forevemore" has been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Andrea Meislin Gallery in NYC in 2005. Yairi photographs the leper house with a digital video camera in still mode, constructing the image from hundreds of frames. The pictures are taken in the course of several hours, during which the artist slowly and accurately documents every detail in the space from a single position, like the viewer's observation movement upon entering the space. He selects details which he then combines into a final unified photographic image containing a wealth of information, one that no single still photograph can contain. Thus, in fact, Yairi overcomes the temporal and spatial limitations of conventional photography. from exhibition text, Tel Aviv Museum. Yuval Yairi's "Palaces of Memory" series has been exhibited at Alon Segev Gallery in 2007, and in New York at Andrea Meislin Gallery, 2008. The Cage and the Bird "A cage went in search of a bird" wrote Kafka Kafka : a photographic structure went out into the world in search of motifs that would suit it. The result is the heart of this exhibition. The world can be perceived as "at once," as one, absolute, indivisible thing. But it can also be thought of as the sum of an infinite numbers of parts. So it is with everything, small or large: the world exists both as "one" and as a cumulation of an infinity of units. It is this duality that Yuval Yairi's photographs attempt to capture. They are almost all, at one and the same time, a collection of fractions, and a whole. They represent these two states of being - like water attempting to be vapor and ice at one and the same time. The "thickening of time" results from the image of the "art of memory," from which Yairi sets out to make his recent series of photographs, following in the path of Simonides of Ceos, the Greek poet considered to be the father of mnemonics. Simonides' method of remembering is based on the "translation" of abstract concepts into concrete objects and their imaginary placement in a space well known to the memorizer, based on the assumption that concrete images are easier to remember than abstract ideas. Thus, for example, a poem can be translated into a series of mnemonic images that can be installed in the home of the memorizer. The act of remembering involves a stroll through the house, and the gathering of visual "reminders" along a known path. Dror Burstein
