Text from pamphlet that accompanied the performances of Breath
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Dec. 1994 – Jan. 1995

The span of 20 years or so of creative work done by Adina Bar-On – artist, inter-media artist, performance artist – has taken place at the margins. The margins – those states of interface the formal and medium definition of which is not unambiguous, are characteristic of both the modes of work and the themes of creators pf theater and dance, visual artists, musicians, poets, authors and thinkers in the early part of the century, and more so after the great rupture following the Second World War. The crossing of medium boundaries and the breaking of aesthetic hierarchies – as first in the Dadaist performances and Artaud`s theater of cruelty, then in the works of Nam Jun Paike, Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci and Alan Kaprow and in the 80s in the works of Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson – are among the qualities that have made artists such as these the disputed paver’s of the way of the retroactive definition of post modernism, and of what may be expected after it.

Adina connects in her work with a broad range of artists who have tried with their synaesthetix approach to create intersecting and complementary systems of various languages, to the point of dissolution of the object. Paradoxically, the loss of meaning – as a consequence of the decrease in language’s capacity of absorption and its difficulties of conductivity – has led these artists and others who had followed them to seek meaning by way of diminution – in the absent and the minor. one of the questions that resonates through the work  of these artists is how to say/do – in words, in movement, in voice, in visual images and mainly in what is between them – without saying/doing anything  –  i.e without requiring a solid meaning, out of an understanding that a meaning of this kind does not exist, or change frequently.

Adina Bar-On’s artistic practice takes place on this open stage, where inter-media art has a central place. However, as an artist working in some degree of isolation and separation in the local Israeli context as well, in her work she chooses to internalize her relations with the center and, in the performance “Breath”, to bring them to a reductive expression in the single body’s struggle to conduct a dialogue.

In the early 70’s, the conceptual atmosphere and concurrently with the awakening of the performance arts and their decisive resonance in the Israeli art field, Bar-On, then a student in the art department at Bezalel, began seeking a way to abstract the word by means of the body.

In recent years, since the work A Woman of the Pots -the performance (1990) and the video film (1991) – Bar-On has been drawing nearer to her early years of creation, after years during which her work tended towards the more comprehensive planes of the question of identity, which sometimes also touched upon social-political aspects.

In A Woman of the Pots, Bar-On began a process of parting from the dimensions of the “Acconcian Dilemmas”, and in place of these there returned the question that appear more minor, touching upon contexts of every day life, the family and the neighborhood. These have been minimized in the performance Breath, where the multiplicity of characters and faces has completely vanished, and only the powerful transparency of the breathing body remains.

The video created by Alon Eilat, presences the ephemeral and the imperceptible, and constitutes a kind of a convex mirror to the flow of the inner dialogue. In this performance Bar-On focuses herself on the elementariness of the act of breathing, while hinting at the mental implications of the rhythmic changes in the body, while hinting at the mental implications of the rhythmic changes in the body. The nuances of the movement and the forms in space, formulate Bar-On’s “language of no”, in which we see the rise and the fall, the appearance and the disappearance, the saying and the elimination, of abstract claims which have just begun the quest for stability.