Meital Covo is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, sound, photography and installation, currently living and working in Jerusalem. She has exhibited her works in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and abroad, including at the Cinemathèque of the British Film Institute (BFI); the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; and the Musrara Mix Festival, Jerusalem. Covo is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and earned an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. She received the Artist-Teacher grant (‘Aman More’) for the years 2017/18 and 2018/19, and was twice awarded a scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF).
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“The motivation behind my artistic endeavor is a desire for contact, but also a fear of it. My works are imbued with a strong, sometimes even threatening sense of intimacy, an intimacy which I believe that initiates in the meeting points between mind and matter. In my works I am trying to capture this suture between our psyche and our flesh, in its ephemeral manifestations, which would otherwise disappear.”
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Meital Covo’s practice enfolds two existential experiences: intimacy and solitude. Through her works she researches, collects, deconstructs, and reassembles these two basic states of ‘being alone’ and ‘being together’, in their intense yet ephemeral manifestations. Among the materials with which she has worked in recent years are sleep-talking, shouts from remote places, voices from the women’s section at the Western Wall, and leftovers from clinics of Parisian psychologists.
Hence, the materials for Covo’s work are mostly created by others, in an automatic and unaware manner. The work process includes collecting them with a camcorder or a sound recording device, and a meticulous deconstruction and reconstruction of the recorded material. Being interested in the artistic experience rather than the artistic object, her works often result in an installation that defines the conditions for the encounter between the edited materials and the audience.
Central to Covo’s practice is an ongoing interest in corporeal interfaces between the conscious and the unconscious mind. She is attracted by situations where the innermost presents itself in the external, where confusion between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ takes place. Through the use of visceral and mental human leftovers, Covo is asking what does it mean to be a human, here and now.
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“ Covo’s works demonstrate interpretations of the mouth as an organ that connects the body’s inner depths with its external surface (and by analogy—the depths of the psyche and human psychology with one’s environment and social setting). As an apparatus which is used not only for speech, but also to fill one’s body with air and food, Covo construes the mouth as a conduit between exterior and interior, and vice versa. Her works thus deconstruct various oral actions: laughter, screaming, chewing, and speaking.”
(Nogah Davidson, exhibition text, The Jerusalem Artists’ House, 2017)
meital.covo[at]gmail.com
MEITAL COVO | מיטל קובו 