Yara Haskiel

Yara Haskiel experiments with found footage, new media and performative formats through video essays and multi-screen installations. The connections between memory and (dis-) placement of minor and forgotten narratives and their social effects are central themes in her works: Memory Extended (2011) and Tsakalos Blues (2014). Further she deals with practices of mourning through storytelling and the effects of precarity in relation to love from a feminist perspective: It’s late, a mourning spell (2017), I don’t write diaries I, II: On Love and Crisis and the Power of Fragility (2016).

Tsakalos Blues develops along years of conversations between the artist and her father Gabriel who grew up as in post-war Germany as a stateless person. Together they revisited places closely linked to their family history: Munich, Salonica, Haifa and Eilat.  The painful past, memories and traumas were not only transferred in a subtle way through habits and the echo of specific words but also through certain strategies of surviving, strategies of distancing from the past in order to celebrate the simple fact of being alive. This is a video essay that affirms a forthright proletarian “blues” between the second and third generation after Shoah.