Yael Meiry: "Doing Right By You"

This exhibition is based on Yael Meiry's artist's book, Doing Right by You, published in 2018. The book is based on an archive containing about 150 photographs, in which the artist photographed themself, the people close to them, and the spaces around them. As in other projects, Meiry uses low-tech technologies alongside digital media.

Following the book, the photographs in this exhibition present a violent, disturbing connection between Israeli spaces and queer bodies. The complex images, which combine feminine and masculine appearance, reveal a deep fracture in the binary role division that accompanies the modern gaze, which is habituated to actions of identification, sorting, and classification.

Culture scholar Sivan Rejuan Shtang notes that Meiry's photographs center on the relationship between the body, classified according to gender, and territory that is classified as "national." According to Shtang, "The bodies  appearing in Meiry's photographs are simultaneously vulnerable and brazen."

The bodies that operate in Meiry's territory can be observed in the philosophical terms proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari posit that territory is always corporal, and that the body is always territorial. In this context they coined the term "geo-body." For them, the "body" is perpetually in a process of becoming – as a concept, image, or role. In this sense, Meiry creates bodily territories or territorial bodies that reorganize relations between the images, roles, and concepts of sexuality, gender, and Zionism.

In Meiry's works, bodies "become queer." Hetero-normative physical appearance becomes fluid and is not subject to essentialist and incontrovertible concepts. Meiry creates an intense, courageous body of works that grants visibility to the local queer-feminist community. This act necessarily situates them on the margins of the Israeli socio-political arena. The forms appearing in the works reflect a position that calls for the dismantling of the powerful Zionist regime of visibility in the ethnocratic State of Israel. In the 21st century, this state is still based on a binary and hierarchical gender role division, which Meiry seeks to question.

Yael Meiry was born in Ra'anana in 1982. They live and work in Tel Aviv and Hukok