Other is a piece composed of a performative event and its leftovers.  

 

In the middle of the 1950s-original floor, the artist placed a long cardboard element, covered by a mix of signs from the textile industry and patterns made by the artist forming a snake-like figure. On one side of the mat, a cactus shaped hanger displays four bandana paintings. 

Five young men will stand barefoot on the mat, evocative of a fashion runway. Each of the young men will wear a white slim fitting dress shirt, sporting a definition of otherness painted as an uneven pattern, sometimes covering a big part of the shirt – breaking the words into shapes, and others as a small detail charged with meaning.

 

At the end of the performance, the men will undress the shirts to place them on the wall, forming visual definitions and types of otherness, quoted from the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Lucy Irrigary, Giles Deleuze and Donna Haraway. The writings engage with the critique of posthumanist theories on future human as master subject.

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Other is a site-specific work that derives from the artist's interest in the fusion between art and fashion on one hand, and in the hybrid character of The Cactus Man: the merging of a cactus and a man into an androgenic creature covered with thorns. Through this character the artist intend to give visual representation to definitions of otherness. Cactus Man is also the brand that stands behind the line of wearable art articles the artist had developed during the last two years, with the belief in fashion as the voice for new identities.

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The piece stresses the tension between The Cactus Man: a fantastic hybrid monster, and Cactus Man: the brand that presents a collection of radical fashion.  In other words, Katz Minerbo brings together two different outlooks of the world: a fantastic, rich and free one, and a Capitalist one that brings forward the slogan: you are what you buy and what you wear. Asking what happens to someone who wears a shirt with a definition of otherness.

 

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Other

Gallery 4, Tel Aviv

Curator Leor Grady