Dror Daum: Scared to Die / Scared to Live

Opening Thursday, September 18, 8pm The Center for Contemporary Art presents two solo exhibitions by Dror Daum: Scared to Die and Scared to Live. The latter addresses modern life’s fears, threats, and angst: diseases, accidents, earthquakes, murders, etc. The former focuses on the equally threatening and complex issues of courting and mating: loneliness, jealousy, and their cycles of frustration. In Daum’s own words, his works “deal with the existential anxiety present in Western culture, with contemporary memento mori, and with our culture’s inherent potential for danger and destruction.”

Dror Daum’s education at Bezalel Academy’s Department of Photography funneled his creativity into the field of photography in terms of medium, format, printing, framing, and mounting. However, at best, his practice can be defined as “photography-informed.” Instead of adhering to photography’s traditional mode of going out to the world to hunt for images, Daum programmatically avoids conventional processes by seeing photography as an image in our retina, or alternatively as an object in the world, and changing the reciprocal relations between photography and space.

The exhibitions at the CCA are accompanied by a catalogue including essays by Sergio Edelsztein and Guy Ben-Ner. The exhibitions close on December 4th, 2014.

Dror Daum (b. 1970, Jaffa) is based in Tel Aviv. He has had solo exhibitions at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, among others. Select group exhibitions include: Art TLV, 2nd Tel-Aviv Biennale of Contemporary art, Tel-Aviv; Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Daum has received awards from the Israel Ministry of Culture in 2014 and 2005, and from the Bezalel M.F.A. program in 2008.