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Ari David

video , textile , social , public space , performance , Media , Body , LGBTIQ+ , installation ,Experimental , Audiovisual , Artistic research

In my practice I explore how the social is inscribed in the body, focusing on themes of identity, collectivity, and dissent. My interdisciplinary work includes writing, video, sound, textiles, and performance, emphasizing small gestures and the choreographies of everyday life to reflect on how bodies are shaped in Western society. This approach opens an interval to get closer, to lean in, to pay attention to the detail, the subtle and the unsaid.

White Gold
White Gold - 2024 White Gold takes asparagus as both material and metaphor. Its history, its scent, and the traces it leaves on the body reveal wider systems of power and extraction. Following the pathways of this single crop, the work asks: what becomes visible or stays hidden, when value and labor meet at a sensory level? Scent moves beneath language, clings to skin, lingers in the air. It recalls, unsettles, disturbs. In a culture oriented around sight and sound, smell offers another kind of knowledge—intimate, immediate, often unconscious—shaping how bodies are sensed, policed, or consumed. White Gold unfolds as an episodic exploration of trials and failures in the pursuit of an asparagus-based perfume. Each episode centers on a different method of scent extraction, treating the process itself as a site of reflection and encounter. The first, filmed in Berlin with Vangjush Vellahu (AL) and Tristan Nicolas (RO), documents an attempt at extraction that opens into a conversation about their shared experiences of living in Germany. The second, filmed in Rotterdam with Marta Hryniuk, shifts toward what remains unseen: the energy expanded, the warmth transferred, and the body's imprint within the act of extraction.
How To Fall Better
How To Fall Better - Video installation, two-channel video, 26'26'', text In collaboration with Min Yoon How To Fall Better explores the physical and emotional dimensions of labor and endurance through choreographed, repetitive movements. Created in collaboration with Butoh dancer and performer Min Yoon, the piece centers on a cyclical choreography of falling and recovery, stretched over time to interrogate collapse both as an intimate bodily experience and a broader social metaphor.
Wear Me Out
Wear Me Out - RIB, 2025
Wear Me Out
Wear Me Out - 2024Wear Me Out centers exhaustion as a political and social experience. Across forty minutes, the performance refuses productivity in its usual, linear sense. Instead, it assembles a broken chorus of voices, gestures, and testimonies that speak to the lived politics of exhaustion. The work draws from conversations with artists and cultural workers about exhaustion, alongside personal reflections, interwoven with fragments from articles, books, and other sources. Through stories spanning gig work, art-making, and migration, it reveals how exhaustion is unevenly distributed along lines of class, geography, gender, and labor precarity. At the same time, the performance critically explores the dual role of performativity as both an artistic practice and a social expectation under capitalism. Designed to evolve over time, the work grows with new testimonies and ongoing reflection, allowing it to remain responsive and open-ended. The performer's body becomes a site of accumulation – of histories, pressures, and silenced voices- transforming personal exhaustion into collective resonance. Wear Me Out is not about solving exhaustion, nor transcending it. It is about staying with it in a collective way, tracing its textures, repetitions, and quiet violences. In doing so, the work offers exhaustion not as a dead end but as a space of shared recognition. The work was part of the event "Body Fluids and Fantasies", hosted by the Wrocław Cultural Institute as part of the What's Next program organized by the Gabriela Tudor Foundation, the Wrocław Cultural Institute and Proto Produkciia.
Wild Animal - Part of In Spite of Everything at another world, Rotterdam Felt, 2023 Dimension variable
In Spite of Everything - In Spite of Everything traces gestures of refusal and discontent through the act of spitting. Through this codified bodily gesture, David examines personal and collective histories that are entangled with themes of gender, capitalism and patriarchy. Reflecting on spitting becomes an exploration of magic, pleasure, intimacy, contagion, and vulnerability in relation to the body. Thus, spitting is seen not only as a refusal, but also as a connector to other forms and ways of being.
In Spite of Everything - The project is inspired by an encounter with a scene from the video Physics of Love (1998) by Diane Bonder. In this scene, a portrait photograph of the artist's mother is splashed upon. Together with Marta Hryniuk, David decided to recreate the scene as a meditation on the visceral states of the body, unresolved personal relationships and the disruption of the familiar. The gestures and moments that are collected invite us to lean in closer, to pay attention to the detail, the subtle, and the unsaid.
A Year Without A Summer - Sound Installation, 50min. With Raluca Croitoru, Pilar Mata Dupont and Tracy Hanna Composer Janne Piksen Photos by Sophie Bates and Marta Hryniuk
Waiting Tenses - 2020
Waiting Tenses - 2020

Residency What's Next

Date:
Location: Bucharest and Wroclaw
In association with: Gabriela Tudor Foundation, the Wrocław Cultural Institute, and Proto Produkciia

ZK/U Residency

Date:
https://www.zku-berlin.org/

In Spite of Everything

Date:
Location: an other world

Made possible with the support of CBK Rotterdam

A Year Without A Summer

Date:
Location: WET
In association with: WET

The result of a Development and Research Subsidies (R&D) grant from CBK

Waiting Tenses

Date:
Location: Available and the Rat
http://availableandtherat.com/

From Here to There

Date:
Location: Tranzit.ro/cj
https://ro.tranzit.org/en/project/0/2019-12-18/from-here-to-there

Residency

Date:
In association with: Dogo Residenz für Neue Art
https://dogoresidenz.ch/en/

I need a rhythm

Date:
Location: At7
In association with: At7

TALK on Gender and Body Movement in Art

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Location: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Tripping Autonomy

Date:
Location: The Crown

Landscapes

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Location: Conversa

Swarming Spawns Rebel Workers

Date:
Location: Kralingen Botanical Gardens
In association with: Ghost

Why Is Everybody Being So Nice?, The Power Nap

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Location: Stedelijk Museum
In association with: De Appel

Screening with Irina Botea Bucan

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Location: Neverland Cinema
In association with: Piet Zwart Institute

T H IS I S A LL U R E

Date:
Location: Wolfart Projectspace
In association with: Piet Zwart Institute

Why Is Everybody Being So Nice?

Date:
Location: De Appel
In association with: De Appel
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