Dana Levy is born in Tel Aviv 1973, and currently lives in Israel. She creates in the field of digital photography, single channel video and video/multi media installations.
Her work deals with notions of identity and borders. Home, belonging, and temporal architecture. Participated in artist residencies in Austria ,Finland and the US.
She has had solo shows at the Haifa Museum of Art, Rosenfeld Gallery Tel Aviv, Digital art lab Israel. She has participated in various group shows including Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Smack Mellon NY, OK center for Contemporary art Austria, Jewish Museum NY and her videos were screened at various film festivals including : VideoFormes 2007 / Clermont-Ferrand 2007, Mediterranean Film Festival of Montpellier, France 2006, 2004, Archipelago International Film Festival Rome 2005, Hollywood short film festival 2006, Filmwinter Stuttgart Film Festival, Germany 2004. Her short film "house by the wall" won the no budget jury award in Hamburg short film festival 2006
Dana Levy into O'A.I.R. residency
For the past year I have been taking photographs of empty spaces around Israel and Sanai desert in Egypt, and have especially been interested in the marks people have left in the space.
Be it an abandoned half built palace-like, luxury hotel in Sanai, which the builders filled with naive wall drawings, which is not being finished as no more tourists wish to visit the area due to terrorist attacks.
Or a military base near the Israeli Dead Sea shore, which is no longer used. These are places of dreams and dramas.
In Italy I visited museums and palaces and was intrigued by their luxurious architecture and the powerful renaissance paintings in them. These places emphasised for me the dull simplicity of Israel. a place with no rich modern cultural history, only a biblical one (which is always referred to, also in talk about the present situation). A place where everything is modern, minimal, practical (unless it is trying hard to imitate the European style.), and yet so much drama exist there.
The Renaissance painting take the stories which were based in Israel, and add blood, gold and tears, wings, halos and horns.
Im interested in comparing the two, The Middle Eastern spaces, with the European-Italian ones. The simple and realistic place of a stories origin, compared to the rich imaginative fantasy version of it.
Im interested the human need for drama and strong emotions, but also for simplicity and routine. A place where there is too much drama,where one doesnt know what the next day will bring, one only hopes for boredom and routine. A place where there much routine and no surprises, one often seek to create dramatic soap opera stories.
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