Yishay Garbasz “Women’s Art Doesn’t End at the Outer Labia”

Anita Rogers Gallery

This event has ended.

You have to deal with your story. Know what it is. Then you can see others because it’s like a mirror inside you that you have to polish. And only in the mirror inside you can you see outside of yourself.

-Yishay Garbasz

Anita Rogers Gallery presents Women’s Art Doesn’t End at the Outer Labia, an exhibition of work by British-Israeli artist Yishay Garbasz.

While the interdisciplinary artist has been creating and exhibiting work internationally, and giving voice to marginalized viewpoints, for over two decades, this will be the artist’s debut exhibition with Anita Rogers Gallery. The gallery seeks to introduce new viewers to Garbasz’s varied bodies of work and acquaint them with themes she visits frequently in her work, including gender, trauma, and memory. This exhibition will include selections from her Bearing Witness projects, and from series that explore her personal narrative, history, and experiences. Photographs on view will document locations that have been home to trauma and violence – although they don’t always immediately reveal this history upon first look - including lines of defense in warring countries, and images of Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, the site of the second most catastrophic nuclear disaster in history (second only to Chernobyl). Other works explore the experiences of gender and identity, including the pointed, playful, and personal ‘Eat Me Damien’ piece, which displays Garbasz’s testicles, removed during a gender affirmation surgery, preserved in formaldehyde. Taken all together, the works highlight the artist’s long-term goal to shine light on people, places, and memories that are usually left in the dark, too often overlooked, and to present them with clarity, with compassion, and with pride.

Garbasz (b.1970) studied photography with Stephen Shore at Bard College between 2000 and 2004, and received the Thomas J Watson Fellowship in 2004/05. In 2010, she was awarded the Berlin Woman Filmmaker of the Year award for her project Becoming. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including: Tokyo, Seoul, New York, Miami, Boston, Busan, Paris, and London, and she is featured in the Phaidon publication, Great Women Artists (2019). She is a recipient of the 2021 Kunstfonds Arbeitsstipendium. She currently lives and works in Berlin.