Uri Katzenstein
[ Israel ]
performance
'Vehicles'
Sat 2nd Oct. 2004
18.00
installation exhibition
[view by appointment]
3rd - 24th Oct. 2004

Dream scapes, changed identities, possible vehicles, roots, and songs. Blood writing, territories of faith.
With the help of these metaphoric images and actions I may refer to any number of hybrid units that form the basis of interpersonal similarities and preferences. My thoughts images and actions are taken from cultural, psychological, and/or emotional to biological, intellectual, structures and relations.

The gathering of such known phenomena, intermixed with sculptural sensibilities makes place for an arena of the invented culture.

Uri Katzenstein is one of Israel's most accomplished and renowned live performance and interdisciplianry artists.
Katzenstein studied at the San Francisco Art institute in the late 1970¹s, and after receiving his MFA he moved to New York City where he was throughout the eighties. In New York he became a regular at such legendary performance venues such as the Kitchen and The Knitting Factory. His often visceral actions where combined with music and manipulated sound to create a physical, visual and sonic attack upon his audiences senses and sensibilities.
He is now based in Tel Aviv and teaches at Hiafa University. In 2001 he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale.

'The body is the central axis from which images in Uri Katzenstien¹s works branch out. Not only does the artist himself, or his body, serve as a hook, one could almost say a carrier, for the different instruments in his musical performances, but his body is also at the centre of his sculptural works. The intentional blurring of boundaries between catagories is one of Katzenstein¹s characteristic artistic activities: The living grows out of the inert, the technological becomes poetic, the primal and wild blends with the hi-tech. The symbols of violence and sadism are mixed with emblems of castration and impotence just as Dog becomes God in the inscriptions imprinted on both sides of his artist-designed knuckle-duster.'