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 suspended by a deadlift belt. The crane belongs to Itamar's father, who was paralyzed from the waist down following a bicycle accident. His father's injury, which forced the artist to reconsider a complicated and deferred relationship underscored by masculinity and unfulfilled expectations, is woven through his experience 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 the 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.” Yet waiting at the end of bodily servitude to commodity 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.