Yoav Ruda

Phototypes / Yoav Ruda

Yoav Ruda is a media artist who works predominantly with
video and moving images. The works he creates are usually in motion, based on rhythm and music, and projected on screens – on stages, in art venues, online, and on television.

The series featured in this exhibition is based on portraits Ruda gathered online (found footage) that underwent an optical process. Ruda has projected the images on various objects and recaptured the outcome with his camera.

The initial raw materials in this series are readymades and video footage that float around the digital sphere. To these, Ruda adds images he photographed, then combines, deconstructs, and re-edits everything using a video mapping software. The images are projected on different objects. At the end of the process, Ruda captures the vision he formulated, effectively creating a documentation of the video installation.

This practice is the extension of his work as a visual content creator for live music concerts. A well-known name in the rock industry, Ruda has collaborated with top musicians in Israel, among them the band Eifo HaYeled, Danny Sanderson, Berry Sakharof, Minimal Compact, Mashina, Ehud Banai, Hadag Nahash and more. In addition to all these, Ruda exhibited his own works in many shows in museums and galleries in Israel and worldwide.

Ruda’s subject matters shift between the poetic and the mundane, between history and art history to street art. The list of figures at the center of his work seems like it was taken straight out of the Walk of Fame: trailblazing scientists and philosophers alongside the forefathers of Zionism and its
leaders, representatives of Modernism and pop culture icons, alongside icons of local poetry and prose.

A place of honor is reserved to the artists of Dada and
Surrealism, who turned photomontage into a handwriting and the removal from context into a manifesto. Marcel Duchamp, Dali, Lee Miller and others appear on the Dada wall. Next to them, in a topical note, Ruda adds the figures behind the ‘73 debacle: Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, whose portraits are projected on kitchenware.
The cauliflower, on which the figure of Albert Einstein is projected, traces a neural map, whereas the figure of David Ben-Gurion and his famous hut are projected on standard bread. 

The collection of images that spread along the walls of the
gallery present a riddle of sorts. The montage is deliberately exposed and recognizable, but the syntax formulated by Ruda attests to an intuitive, associative language. The key to understanding the connections between the photographed figure and the object on which it is projected requires the type of logic used to solve a cryptic crossword, often laced with a tongue in cheek humor.

Curator: Vardi Kahana