Futurism

Yeah, you're doing your art, or thinking about doing your art, or hoping you'll have time and money to make art (or music), and then someone like Anat Ben-David pops up on your desktop, flowing easily with a ocean of possibilities. Anat Ben-David works in video, performance, installation, text, pain...moret, sculpture, and probably many other forms I'm too busy to mention. It's her 2008 work that caught my eye, an imaginary, international, all girl, group band. The band members are multicultural /multilingual and fictional, Anat performs all the band members by duplicating her image. I loved all of it, and still want more.

About Anat Ben-David latest work www.yippieyeah.co.uk/anat Anat Ben-David is part of an endangered species of true Renaissance artists, educated from a young age as dancer and painter in the UK and Israel, growing up to become a mover and shaker in Jerusalems underground scene, then choosing performance art as a weapon of mass distraction incorporating and integrating video, theatre and plastic art into a gesamtkunstwerk that challenged audiences and peers in a scene too tiny and puny for her artistic vision. Next stop London! Drawing from a range of classical avant-garde traditions - painting to performance to cabaret - Anat Ben-Davids incarnation as neo-pop diva was born out of her not-entirely PC meditation on pop and Fascism, the Popaganda project. Ben-David nobly tributes modernist art movements like Dada and Futurism while at the same time mobilising their aesthetics and ideas to create an artistic discourse walking on a tightrope: welding utopian modernist rallying cries to the individual yet authoritarian stage persona, and applying mass marketing sensibilities not in the service of capital, but of autonomous, empowered, defiant art-for-its-own-sake. Ben-David channels dormant, fading roars from a century back, placing them in the contemporary arena thus opening yet another conceptual border-crossing portal. Applied musically, her approach results in a gnarly, grrly beast that lends contemporary electro-femdom an aroma of timelessness, an instinctive grasp of wider historical context and a mastery of entertainment erected on a will to power. Avi Pitchon (Vice Magazine, Terrorizer, The Wire)