Michal Shachnai Yaakobi, a multidisciplinary artist and curator, was born in 1967 (Kibbutz Yifaat), lives and works in Kiryat Tivon, is an alumna of the Institute of Art at Oranim College (B.Ed. and M.Ed. cum laude). Shachnai Yaakobi is the permanent curator at the Gallery of Israeli Art, Tivon Memorial Center.

 

In her works, Shachnai Yaakobi uses by means of installation sculpture or video to investigate the ways in which the Israeli collective memory is shaped via motion, language, choral song, space and momentum, and material culture. Her creative work is the outgrowth of her biography as the product of a kibbutz and a bereaved daughter. The resulting art emerges from a place of consciousness to a physical space fraught with meanings and collective Zionist national values, on the one hand, and the sense of emptiness that came later pursuant to their collapse, on the other.

 

The raw material of her works is an eclectic collection—assorted objects such as archive materials that are unpacked, adjoined, and corrupted—that erupts from its immediate local Israeli context toward universal, archetypical, and mythological contexts. Enveloping mixed emotions of pain and yearning in a coating of humor and irony, the artist creates something new, something that will accommodate all of this complexity.

 

Shachnai Yaakobi’s works have been displayed in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and abroad. They include a solo exhibition at the art gallery of Kibbutz Ramat Menashe (2019) and another in planning at the Petah Tikva museum (2024). The group exhibitions include the Tel Aviv Biennale of Crafts and Design at the Eretz Israel Museum (2023); the Kupferman Collection House at Lohamei Hagetaot (2022); the Zuzu Gallery (2020); Zumu, the Museum on the Road (2019); Artspace Tel Aviv (2019), the Wilfrid Israel Museum at Kibbutz Hazorea (2017), and the Casa de los Tiros in Granada, Spain (2017). Her works are also found in private collections and appear in various academic articles.