ABOUT ME 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)
..ANAT BEN DAVID
