Meet our Curator-in-Residence 2017: Yara Sonseca Mas

ara Sonseca Mas is a Spanish-born Curator and Art Historian. Between 2006 and 2015, she was Director of Exhibitions at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. She has curated institutional exhibitions including solo and site specific projects and has commissioned artworks by emerging artists as well as coordinated various other exhibitions. She has edited publications on Antonin Artaud, John Cage, Louise Bourgeois, Arthur Rimbaud, Joseph Kosuth, Andy Warhol, among others.

The Curator-in-Residence is a new programme by the Salzburger Kunstverein. Yara Sonseca Mas was awared the Curator-in-Residence out of 46 international applications. In partnership with the City of Salzburg’s Artist-in-Residence Programme, this programme offers a studio-apartment in the historic Künstlerhaus in central Salzburg to curators for one month. The aim of this residency programme is to spur curatorial research and discourse in Salzburg. Resident curators may develop a project in partnership with the Salzburger Kunstverein and / or Salzburg City, or conduct research or writing pertinent to their interests. A stipend is provided along with the fully equipped studio-apartment.

Artist in Residence: Zohar Gotesman

Zohar Gotesman (1979, Israel) is a sculptor based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was selected to do a residency for three months in the Salzburger Kunstverein. He is currently working on a project in the city of Salzburg…

Hello Zohar, first I wanted to know about your origins, you were born and raised in Israel. I read you grew up in a community called Moshav…can you tell me how is it  growing up there?

Actually it was a small agricultural village at that time. My grandparents came to Israel in 1934 from Poland. They were pioneers and they created this communal socialist village and lived in it. When I grew up it was not very ‘communal’ anymore, each family owned a farm, and they got a land from the state to cultivate but in the 90’s there was a crisis in agriculture, so people move on to other jobs. There was a very big change in the world towards capitalism, so people didn’t care about agriculture anymore or socialist life, Israel was very much affected from it. People begin to care about real state, so billionaires bought this land, and between them the original inhabitants of the village continued to have a simple life.

Tell me more about you work Over Fertilization. Is it biographical? 

Actually yes, but you can see the work as a portrait of this specific place, my birthplace; or as a microcosmos for the whole country.

 Installation View, from Agro-Art The Petach Tikvah Museum of Art. Curator: Tali Tamir

The top of this sculpture, the horse and the rider, are made from manure. There relies this tension between classical sculpture techniques and mundane everyday materials that we see in a lot of your works… how did you got the idea of working with this unusual material?

For the exhibition “Agro-art” in the Petach Tikvah Museum, the curator invited 12 artists with a background in agriculture. When I started researching, I took the archaeological method of survey, and used it in the farm where I grew up. I started walking and collecting remains which I found on the ground. When I finished this survey, I broke the rules and went a little further into the sand dunes behind the farm. To my surprise, I found myself inside a huge hole in the ground and then I understood that someone stole the sand and instead put a vast pile of horse manure, immediately it struck me – this will be my main source of material for this work (plus it´s free!) –

Installation View, from Agro-Art The Petach Tikvah Museum of Art. Curator: Tali Tamir

Why a horse rider?

In Israel it´s very rare to find the “horse rider” type of monument on public spaces. I decide I want to sculpt a new kind of prince. The next thing was to stuff this outside monument in between the walls of the museum. By doing this the prince was beheaded. In the back of the trailer that became the base of the monument, I placed an archaeological section with imaginary artifacts, for instance a wooden tractor toy with all my family on it, including my dog.

Talking about dogs, it seems they appear so much in your work, for example your recent installation in Tel Aviv Museum of Art, “Dog Dish”, tell me a little bit about it…

In “Dog Dish” I created an italian piazza in the middle of the museum. At the center of this piazza stands a red wine fountain made of a single block of Carrara marble, in it I sculpted more than sixty gargoyles/dogs. On the top stands a ´Jeff Koonsie´chihuahua, he spits wine up in the air. It stands on top of a dog drooling and licking his genitals, which sits on four poodles that are crying the wine. Those are standing on four pugs who lick each others asses and pee down on four pairs of evil dogs, who hump each other, while puking. At the bottom layer, sixteen bloodhounds are tearing apart little chihuahua puppies. All of this pile is standing in a big marble dog dish. The wine is collected in the dish and it circulates over and over.

Dog Dish, Installation View, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2017.

From the first moment, the wine got sucked into the marble and changed it´s pure white appearance into dark brownish spots, which was fertile ground for the growing of fungus.

Dog Dish, Installation View, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2017.

When did you knew you wanted to become a sculptor?

Everything started really early, when I was 2 or 3 years old. I don’t remember but my parents told me this story, I made this clay sculpture when I was in Kindergarden and my teacher told my parents: “he will be a sculptor…”  I think her words got stuck in my head and from that moment I always sculpted.

And what about marble sculpting?

When I was a teenager between 14 and 16, I really loved Michelangelo, I’ve read “the life of Michelangelo”, which is an 800 hundred pages kitschy book, and ever since I had this childish fantasy of sculpting in marble. I tried to teach myself how to sculpt, but it didn’t work, I either broke the stone or the chisel. In the art academy they were focusing mainly on conceptual art and thinking, when I finished the academy I still had this long time wish of studying marble carving;  Israel doesn’t have a long tradition of sculpting in marble because of the ancient religion law that forbids the creation of images, so it took me long time to find a teacher. Through a friend, who knows another friend and so on, I got to go to Carrara for one year, to learn how to carve marble. In Carrara, I started merging between Contemporary and Classic art.

Is very common nowadays for artists to hire a craftsman for producing their works, why did you choose to make it yourself?

First of all, if I send it to others I lose all the fun. Then because of the process of creating it myself, I get to make mistakes which gives me ideas for the next sculpture. I keep learning and learning from everything I do myself. My practice is not about creating products but about the process I go through with them.

Amor Ac Deliciae Generis Humani, Installations shots from “Carrara Syndrome”, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2013.

For example, the sculpture “Amor Ac Deliciae Generis Humani”; in this sculpture I confronted my love towards greco-roman sculptures with my historical identity. I did it by creating four stages of different actions towards the image of the emperor Titus. First, I found images online of broken sculptures of Titus, and merge them together into one complete bust, then I sculpted it in Carrara marble. Secondly, I took a hammer and smashed it into pieces. Thirdly, I created fluorescent glue and restore it and the fourth stage, was carving in latin a sentence of the Roman historian Suetonius, depicting Titus as the darling and delight of human race.

-In the history of Jewish nation, Titus was the emperor who destroyed the second temple in the year 70 AD. He massacred and sent the jewish people into exile.-

Finally, I would love to know what are you planning to do here in Salzburg?

Something with Mozart Kugeln!! (laughs) I was looking on the internet how to make chocolate, I want to cover all of this wall in chocolate (points at this enormous 10 m wall in his studio). I am also looking for some local stone to work with… I wanted to go into museums and copy things, like this baby (he is currently sculpting a baby out of wood in his studio). I wanted to work outside, maybe doing an intervention in the city that keeps changing all the time; like a stop motion sculpture, suddenly the head is changing, or the next day the arms are becoming bigger… Maybe change the head of this european prince from the XVIII century from marble, to the head of a moor prince from black marble, making small changes…

You can see more of Gotesman’s work on his official page https://www.zohargotesman.net/

Interview by: Daniela Gómez