Gideon Gechtman

Gideon Gechtman's work Exposure (1974) was created as a video performance. Gechtman documented himself thoroughly shaving his naked body a short time after undergoing a heart operation. The act of shaving, which was extended from the chest to the entire body, transformed his illness into an expanded metaphor, a ritual amplification of the loss of identity, of sickness and of the prospect of death. The possibility of addressing the condition of the injured, vulnerable body was made possible at least in part by the generally morbid mood that pervaded Israel after the Yom Kippur War. The personal illness echoes a shocked and battered collective spirit, to which the piling-up of the shaved hair adds Holocaust-related associations.

Born in Alexandria, 1942; lives and works in Rishon LeZion