Daniel Shoshan

Daniel Shoshan is a multidisciplinary artist and curator who has been active in the Israeli art sphere since the eighties. A senior Teaching Associate at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, he established and heads their Architecture and Experimental Art lab.

Shoshan represented Israel in the San Paolo Biennale, and curated the Israel booth at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. His works have been featured at dozens of exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and are part of Museum and Private collections throughout the world. Shoshan’s art is a journey in search for identity, at the heart of which lies an artistic language that brings together seemingly opposite ideas and styles: minimalism vs. figurativism, east and west, religion and secularism, and personal vs. political.

"Collateral Damage"

"In the presence of the unbearable reality, I am faced with two options of artistic
activity: to flee, or to testify. I choose the moral, humane option, the most difficult of all positions: to be a witness." Daniel Shoshan

For most of the years in which the IDF has been operating in the Occupied Territories, and even before they became a territory of radical religious Jews, Daniel has been documenting, sketching, drawing, photographing everything that happens in this region. In recent years, he has been following the pictures – his own and those of photojournalists – that document the acts of occupation and the abuse perpetrated by the army and by the Israeli radicals in the Occupied Territories. The act of watching these images, of both types, is difficult in itself, but he also goes beyond the role of observer, drawing the events and processing the images.

His works are about us, about the memory of our actions and our occupation; but they
also deal with memory directly and indirectly, straightforwardly and simply, and sometimes almost surreptitiously, in a way that traces the tension that exists between the themes of "landscape drawing" and "figure drawing," on the one hand, and the origin of the photographic subject on the other, and builds the tension between the personal/biographical and the documentation, between the manifest and the hidden.

This is not the first time that his work addresses memory and its meanings: the exhibition "Opening" (Pitho) dealt with personal, familial memory and with the link between personal trauma and national trauma. "Collateral Damage," his new series of works, adopts a complicated perspective on his personal biography and the place in which he lives. It attests to the elusiveness of memory and of the image.

In the history of contemporary art we can identify a movement from the personal
testimony toward artistic practices; from the memory of violence, to the photograph,
and from the photograph to the studio, to drawing and painting that dissect the soul.

Daniel spins a personal web that deals with catastrophe, with an ethical stance, with
historical and artistic responsibility. But at the same time, these drawings allow us to observe the living presence of the figures, events and landscapes not only as part of the safe space of the art work and the studio; to imagine, if only for a brief moment,
that they exist as an actual part of our reality.