Michal Shamir / text

Michal Shamir's works both attract and repel the spectator. The aestheticising elements and the alluring sweetness of some of her working materials are counteracted by the ways in which she uses them. Often employing candy in her sculptural and installative pieces, Shamir creates simple, but suggestive forms, which require space and enter into communication with their surroundings. Although this rather unconventional material belongs to the trivial realm of everyday life, her artworks carry manifold allusions and references to prevalent topoi of art history and contemporary cultural discourses. The familiar is transformed in varying processes of alienation and gets charged with fresh layers of meaning.

Shamir's works often suggest or even utilise body fluids and they thematize bodily processes, physical determination, questions of sex and gender, as well as religious customs, symbols and inscriptions.