Miri Segal is a new media artist. She lives and works in Tel Aviv, studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art and holds a Phd. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University. Now she is a lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and at the Faculty of the Arts -Hamidrasha at Beit Berl College. Segal has exhibited solo exhibitions at prestigious museums and galleries such as Museum Kanal – Centre Pompidou, Belgium; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; The Negev Museum of Art, Israel; as well as group exhibitions at Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Museum Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Italy; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.
She won multiple awards, including The Mifal Hapais, Lottery Committee of the Arts award; The Israeli Fund for Video Art and Experimental Cinema and Artis grants.
MIII JAFFA: Hi Miri, how are you doing these days?
M.S: Personally, I’m fine. I’m worried about the economic collapse that so many workers are experiencing, wondering what will happen to the cultural field and the new anti-democratic means that have entered our lives to stay.
MIII JAFFA: Tell us something about the work from the collection we see here.
M.S: It’s a work from 2002, it’s made up of two identical sculptures or objects-made-ready to use. The sculptures are urinals that are designed for female urination while standing, by attaching them to the body. They are based on a smaller model of Duchamp’s famous urinal adapted to female urination. In addition to the sculptures, there is an “instruction” video projected on a tiny screen, where you see me using one of the sculptures and peeing through it.
MIII JAFFA: Did you experience it differently in these days?
M.S: Honestly, I don’t, it’s a work from almost twenty years ago and I couldn’t think of it in the Corona context, but it’s related to other works I’ve been working on recently.
MIII JAFFA: What are you working on right now?
M.S: I am working on several works, some physical and some virtual. Regarding the work from the collection – “Made-Ready”, recently, during the Corona, I worked on a few adaptive reenactments of iconic works of art for the Zoom platform. One of them was Dan Graham’s “Performer / Audience / Mirror”. My work is called “Up-Close”. I was interested in reproducing Graham’s work on Zoom; It is easy to recreate a situation on Zoom that is very similar to the original performance, but, on the other hand, Graham’s gaze makes the viewer a subject and a participant through eye contact, this component is absent in Zoom, and I think characterizes the new time we are in – a kind of a panopticon where everyone sees, but the possibility of having direct eye contact is gradually disappearing.
Currently, my work “Necrofleur” from 2003 is exhibited at Dvir Gallery, it is also a tribute to Duchamp’s “Fountain”, but this tribute goes through Bruce Nauman’s photography – “Self Portrait as a Fountain” (1966). This work is displayed at Dvir Gallery alongside a text work that is drawn on the gallery space “Last Lust” (2020).
MIII JAFFA: Thoughts on the future?
M.S: The subject of the future, where we are going as a society, concerns me very much. I hope to be able to put my thoughts and feelings about it in my following works.
