Doron Polak / A Body of Evidence

Author:  Dr. Michael Lazar

The “Whitebox” art gallery in Munich Germany. A cold winter’s night. The naked body of a bald man emerges from a large stack of newspapers. He washes it with red wine. A video where he is stuffing pieces of bread into the openings of an old train station is screened on his back. The man wraps his body in a red string and leaves the stage with the newspapers rolled into his stomach…. This is a performance from the interdisciplinary artist, producer and curator from Israel – Doron Polak and his  “Bodies” series. Previous works have been shown in the Kunstpunkt in Berlin and at Goldsmiths University of London. For the last ten years, Polak has been researching the limits of working with the body while running a laboratory for theatrical study with additional artists – photographers, sculptors, scientists, dancers and performance artists. In each of his works, he combines the space and arbitrary objects, with his own mental state and unlimited passion to confront his family’s past history (second generation of Holocaust survivors) and with the present, the society he lives in and the art world in which he works.

Sigmund Freud claimed “it has always been thought that the dream is a physical phenomenon that has no role in the soul and is subjected to interpretation and exposure of the subconscious. The journey to know the dream begins from a personal experience of pain”. Dreams are created to fulfill a wish. His psychoanalysis connects feelings and their environment, with exposed symptoms and subconscious occurrences. “Bodies” is now dealing with projects connected to Jewish identity – his latest installation is currently on display in Coney Island as part of an international symposium on this topic; and to the mythical “Golem”, which raises questions of one man’s control – his soul and body – on another. Most of Polak’s work during the past two years are conducted in the nude and are characterized by a dramatic dialog that includes physical contact between different artists who are blindfolded.

The Israeli theoretician Miki Dagan said “man is an interactive creature born into relationships. In early life, communication with others is emotional, pre-symbolic and not verbal while later communication becomes more symbolic and explicitly verbal”. Accordingly, and according to the dramatic interactions of the “Bodies” project, the “caretaker” and the “one being taken care of” operate on each other and together create an emotional environment that reflects the pair’s internal reference point. In these meetings, which are charged with artistic and creative suspense, questions of status, roles and responsibilities arise from the meeting of two artists working in a detached space. This creates a changing set of rules of seen and unseen, permanent and temporary and possibly even controller and controlled.

An integral part of the “Bodies” project is the Sisyphean documentation in stills and video by artists who have joined this artistic journey over the past decade. The meetings are meticulously documented and are usually unedited. As a result real-time documentation exists in the form of writing, drawing, photography and conversations with the participants. The process usually occurs near the end of the meeting itself. The unique principal created has been that the one photographed switches sides and takes the camera in hand, while the artist himself experiences the idea of total and exposed work with his own body. The reversal of roles between the photographer and subject has turned the “Bodies” project into a bolder, more open project, without boundaries – a fascinating and unique meeting between creators in all types of media.

Today, Doron Polak is focusing on the examination of the connection between body and architecture – researching the meaning of “physical architecture”.  This is the summary of a long journey where his body has confronted skyscrapers in New York, abandoned industrial buildings, exposed gallery walls and a cardboard box placed in city centers and fields of wheat. The research included the documentation of a medical capsule containing a miniature camera that was swallowed and whose images were projected later on his exposed body. The topics of “internal” and “external”, “known” and “unknown”, “physical” and “metaphysical” are all part of his artistic study. For the last four years Polak has incorporated elements from the mystical Kabbalah into his work. New materials dealing with the “four elements” have found their way into his vocabulary – water, air, earth and fire – all in confrontation with his and his partners’ bodies. He has worked with bread on his head, worked with water, created a series where his body hugged lit candles that threw warmth and light and had spent hours in nature while his body was united with the earth. From this series he created his ten “body books” that gave expression to materials produced from his body and represent a dramatic stage in his research. His work exhibited at the CCCB in Barcelona and part of which will be shown this fall at the Museum of Modern Art in Prague, dealt with the connection between body and architecture and will invite the audience to try some of the theatrical exercises for themselves. Doron Polak has been trying for over twenty years to adopt public spaces such as a power station’s turbine room, a church-hall, abandoned rooms in rustic buildings, etc. in order to turn them into places of artistic activity open to the general public. All of these provide him with an open studio for him to continue to develop his unbounded research.Author: Almagul Menlibayeva.

My educational background is in the Soviet Russian avant-garde school of Futurism, which I combine with a nomadic aesthetic of Post-Soviet, contemporary Kazakhstan—something that I have been exploring in recent years through my video and photographic work.

I use specific ways of expression in modern and contemporary art as a vehicle to investigate my personal archaic atavism as a certain mystical anthropomorphism. In other words, I explore the nature of a specific Egregore, a shared cultural psychic experience, which manifests itself as a specific thought-form among the people(s) of the ancient, arid and dusty Steppes between the Caspian Sea, Baikonur and Altai in today’s Kazakhstan. In the Russian language, Archaic Atavism is personalized as a being, which points to and creates a different meaning. We are not just speaking about an idea or archaic element in the collective subconscious of a people, but about the embodiment of our archaic atavism which becomes an active entity, just like a creature itself. Our archaic atavism is not just internalized, but also externalized. It is as if he (Archaic Atavism) has been awakened by the Post-Soviet experience of the indigenous Kazakh people, who are becoming their own after 80 years of Soviet domination and cultural genocide. Suddenly he became interested in enculturation and in behavioral modernity. He also began to have entertaining dialogues with the transnational circulation of ideas in contemporary art. For this dialogue, I have chosen the medium of video and photography, and like to work with the notion of memory and reality. My archaic atavism is interested in my video explorations in the Steppes and in Post-Soviet Asia. By editing raw data and combining documentary and staged footage, I become his voice, enabling a cultural eхоdus from long oblivion. My work raises metaphysical questions such as “Who am I?” and “Where shall I go?”; this (psychic) experience and perspective marks my artistic language.