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Yishay Garbasz (born 1970, British/ Israeli) is a cross-over artist who works in the fields of photography, performance and installation. Her main field of interest is trauma and the inheritance of post-traumatic memory. She also works on issues of identity and the invisibility of trans women.
She studied photography with Stephen Shore at Bard College between 2000 and 2004.
She has received the Thomas J. Watson fellowship in 2004/05 and was Berlin woman filmmaker of the year in 2010. Since 2008 she is based in Berlin.
Notable works
In her In my Mother's Footsteps (2004–2009) the artist explores her inherited traumatic memories from her mother's Holocaust experiences. For the project the artist visited every single place her mother's life touched during that period. The project consisted of an exhibition (Tokyo Wonder Site, 2009, Wako Works of Art, 2009, and Busan Biennale 2010) and a book. This book was nominated for the German photo book prize in 2009.
In her project Becoming (2008–2010) Garbasz explores her own body and the changes in her body one year before to one year after her gender affirmation surgery. It is possibly the second largest zoetrope at the time of construction. That project was also a flip book published in 2010 by Mark Batty Publisher. The project was also included in the Busan Biennale 2010.
In the Number Project Garbasz brands herself with the Auschwitz number of her mother. In the same location and size, she photographed her arm as well as herself over the month as the flesh almost heals. This is a social project looking to link the number after her mother's death to daily life in order to create a link with the past and not lose something that was forming in her mother's life.
In "Eat Me Damien," Garbasz looks and pokes fun at the predatory practices of both the art world and world commerce. In this work the artist puts her testicles removed during gender clarification surgery in a fish tank with formaldehyde, reminiscent of Damien Hirst's shark. Shown at Seven at Miami Art Fair.
Ritual and Reality explores the trauma from the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. Color photographs and videos (each a 9 to 12 minute single take) are accompanied by an audio guide that describes Garbasz's three-week journey through the Fukushima exclusion zone in 2013 as well as the more general consequences of the nuclear disaster.