About
Artist Statement
Yoni Niv is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, working at the intersection between music composition, sound art practices and multi-media installations.
Yoni's music and art installations has been presented widely in Israel and abroad. His multi-media installations have been presented internationally at museums and galleries including Tel-Aviv Museum, Herzelyia Museum, Israel Museum, Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) and The New Museum. His musical compositions have been performed by distinguished new music ensembles including JACK and Mivos Quartet, ICE, Argento New Music Ensemble and Musica Nova ensemble.
Yoni performs regularly with leading musicians as an improvisor and an interpreter of new and experimental music in venues and festival including The Stone, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Tectonics festival, Tzlil Meudkan and Mekudeshet festival.
Yoni holds a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Haifa and a doctoral degree in music composition and theory from New York University (2016). He studied composition with Amnon Wolman, Morton Subotnick and Elizabeth Hoffman. His dissertation, under the supervision of Jairo Moreno, examined different modes of thinking temporality in the late 20th century compositional discourse from a psychoanalytic, particularly Lacanian, perspective. His current research studies the intricate relation between sound and the formation of the subject of psychoanalysis.
Yoni taught a wide verity of courses in sound art and experimental music, philosophy of sound and composition at distinguished academic institutes in Israel and New York including NYU, The New School, and Tel Aviv University. Currently a senior faculty at the New Music Department at Musrara School of Art, Jerusalem.
Yoni curated numerous concerts and art exhibitions. Between 2012-2020 he acted as co-artistic director of the Israeli new music ensemble Musica Nova. In 2014, he co-founded The Advanced Study Program for Experimental Music and Sound Art at Musrara School of Art, Jerusalem.
The domain of sound – a liminal space between vibration and thought – has long been the privileged site of my artistic and theoretical explorations. For many years I have worked in the musical field as a composer and performer of experimental and improvised music. In recent years, I have expanded the scope of my work to include interdisciplinary projects, integrating sound, visual and textual elements.
I work almost exclusively within the time-based arts, be it in the form of a stage performance, a multimedia installation, or a musical composition. I am interested in cyclical, non-linear temporal experiences such that collapse the division between space and time. I am fascinated by temporal mechanisms marked by repetition, in its dualism of cut and return.
In recent years much of my work revolves around the function of speech and the intricate relationship between bodies and language. Since 2014, I have explored this relationship in different modalities in a series of performative and multi-media installations. The speaking-beings that populate my works speak minor forms of Hebrew. Their language is uncanny; they voice the pathological, the speech of those whose language has been destroyed.
Collaborative processes are an essential part of my working method. Rather consistently, I have been developing my artworks in dialogue with different artists working in various disciplines and mediums: musicians, performers, video artists as well as light, sound and stage designers. With many of which I have collaborated on several projects, over many years.