Dana Levy

Dana Levy lives and works in New York City, US

Dana Levy is an artist and filmmaker whose work is influenced by a childhood spent between countries and cultures, as the daughter of an Egyptian-German couple. Her transcultural biography has prompted her to interpret diverse cultures and customs through careful readings of their objects and artifacts.

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Dana Levy, Erasing The Green (detail), 2021/22, 35 color prints; video, color, sound, 14’16’’′, dimension variable, courtesy Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv © Dana Levy

Levy is known for her poetic explorations of historical sites, natural history museums, botanical gardens, and state archives. She uses irony to reveal distortions and inversions and employs surreal and fantastic references to propose nonbinary, nuanced, and restorative meanings. Often assuming the role of an explorative documentarist, Levy interviews and dialogues with Indigenous communities and their artifacts as significant historical agents.

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Dana Levy, Erasing The Green (detail), 2021/22, 35 color prints; video, color, sound, 14’16’’′, dimension variable, courtesy Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv © Dana Levy

In her work for the 12th Berlin Biennale, the artist reports on a harsh reality, where surreal elements are already present in the daily lives of its subjects. Erasing the Green (2021/22) addresses both the degradation of occupied Palestinian lands and the erasure of the notorious Green Line to benefit only one of the populations it separates: Israeli settlers. The piece consists of prints of various dimensions—documents, photographs, and maps, among others—accompanied by a video of an online conversation with two experts, who discuss the blurring of the Green Line through planning policies and legal mechanisms that intensify the state-sanctioned polarization of these ethnic groups. Erasing the Green unpacks some of the immensely oppressive systems that maintain a reality that goes against both human nature and the natural world.

Noam Segal

Exhibitions

Dissensus: Legislation, Planning, Architecture, 2021, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (IL)

Currents 119: Dana Levy and New Media Series: Dana Levy, 2021, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis (US) (solo)

VIDEONALE.18: Fluid States. Solid Matter, 2021, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (DE)

The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, 2020, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (US)

The Weight of Things, 2019, Fridman Gallery, New York City (US) (solo)

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