Tamar Ettun: The Yellow Who Wants

For the first time in Sweden, Uppsala Art Museum presents the New York-based and internationally established artist Tamar Ettun, originally from Israel. Tamar Ettun’s artistic oeuvre spans a broad field that includes sculpture, performance and video. In the exhibition The Yellow Who Wants the depiction of everyday rituals, the experience of color and bodily presence indicate how different emotional states can reflect larger political courses of events.

Tamar Ettun’s art appeals to corporeal experiences. Textures, scents, colors, weight and lightness are brought together in a multimedia expression. The exhibition will feature giant inflatables where the audience can enter and be encircled by the yellow colour. For the show Ettun has created sculptural assemblages put together by objets trouvés and plaster cast of body parts. Trough the collective processes in collaboration with The Moving Company, the dance group founded by Ettun in 2013, she explores personal memory and emotional experiences as a foundation for performance and video art. Early performative videos are on view, as are recent larger video art productions in a poetic language. Ettun examines the body’s relationship to the phenomena—the world and the objects in our immediate surroundings—in order to create new experiences via our senses and strengthen our emotional compass.

In 2015, Ettun initiated an extensive project in four parts, titled A Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, which will continue until 2018. It is based on a collection of short texts describing memory fragments from the artist’s childhood years in Jerusalem that have been coded with colors and seasons. The first part, Blue, was presented as a performance and video at Watermill Center as well as an exhibition at Fridman Gallery in New York. The second part, Yellow, the theme at Uppsala Art Museum, comments on Eros, desire and the life drive, and premiered as a performance in Bryant Park in April 2016.

A catalogue has been published in connection with the exhibition and the performance in Uppsala. Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, curator, deals with Ettun’s artistic oeuvre in relation to Sara Ahmeds theory in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. The philosopher Ulrika Carlsson contributes with a text on Eros. Carlsson has a PhD from Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation titled Kierkegaard and Philosophical Eros. She is currently Visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University. Graphic design of the catalogue by Eva Björkman.

Tamar Ettun (b. 1982, Jerusalem) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and performance artist. She is the founder and director of The Moving Company. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. She studied at Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy. Her numerous exhibitions and performances include: Bryant Park, SculptureCenter, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Fridman Gallery, The Watermill Center, Madison Square Park, e-flux, Transformer, The Queens Museum, Braverman Gallery, Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Andrea Meislin Gallery, Performa 13, Performa 11, Performa 09. Ettun has been honored by several organizations including Iaspis, Franklin Furnace, The Pollock Krasner, Fountainhead Residency, The Watermill Center, MacDowell Fellowship, Abron’s Art Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artis, RECESS, and Triangle. Tamar Ettun is represented at Fridman Gallery, New York.

In collaboration with Iaspis, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
With support of Artis Grant program
Gratitude to Franklin Furnace