October 21: Sharon’s Death Sculpture

Israeli installation artist and sculptor Noam Braslavsky unveiled a life-sized, “breathing” sculpture of Ariel Sharon in a coma at the Kishon Gallery in Tel Aviv on this date in 2010. Sharon had been in a coma since suffering a massive stroke in 2006, and Braslavsky proposed that the sculpture “allows people in Israel to mourn the former leader.” Curator Joshua Simon described the work as Sharon’s “an allegory for the Israeli political body -- a dependent and mediated existence, self-perpetuated artificially and out of inertia, with open eyes that cannot see.” Braslavsky, who studied at the Bezalel Art Academy, lives and works in Berlin. Sharon died on January 11, 2014.

“I choose to take Sharon because Sharon is kind of an open nerve in Israeli society, which activated all the spectrum of emotional feelings to what being an Israeli is.”--Noam Braslavsky