Dead Lift 

Edmond de Rothschild Center

2022

"Dead Lift" is a kinetic sculpture consisting of a readymade lifting crane that alternately raises and lowers a slug-like lump hanging by a deadlift belt.
The crane belongs to Itamar's father, who was recently paralyzed from the waist down in a bike accident. His father's injury, which forced the artist to reexamine a complicated, deferred relationship underscored by masculinity and unfulfilled expectations, is weaved through his experiences as a gay man. A recently established fixture of Western economies of spectacle and seduction, the Gay Man runs from impotence with every deadlift. But behind every deadlift is its direct mirror staring the lifter in his face: the deadweight symbolizing the body's inevitable impotence and decay. The power of spectacle, in which the artist is most interested in its gendered registers, "restricts the body over its evocation." But waiting at the end of the road of (bodily) servitude to the commodity, there is nothing but old age and death. Perhaps only inside this place of undesirability are bonds formed, and we can begin to grasp one another, if only slightly.