Ohad Fishof

Ohad Fishof is an interdisciplinary artist. He began his artistic career in the mid-80s as the energetic teenage leader of the pioneering Israeli post-punk band Nosei Hamigbaat. His subsequent time-based art, ranging from dance pieces and performance acts (often in collaboration with his partner, choreographer Noa Zuk) to sound and video installations as well as recorded and live music, has been presented worldwide. Fishof performs his music regularly as part of his solo multimedia and dance works. He also has an improvised music duo with conductor and music curator Ilan Volkov. Soundtracks aside, Album 1 is Ohad Fishof’s first solo album. Some of the music on it was originally created in the context of other art projects, and was then rearranged for inclusion here. Technically electro-acoustic, stylistically idiomatic and liminal, Album 1 carries a strong sense of narrative and seems to be taking place somewhere in the fantasy territory of ethnographic fiction. Its echoes of exotica on one hand, and post-punk on the other, are shaped into idiosyncratic song forms, fronted by changing voice characters.

"Dancing, playing and listening to music are my main life-practices. These activities prepare me for my work as an artist. Although artistic ideas are a mystery - by repeatedly referring us back to the mystery from which they emerged, they put this mystery at the centre of the art work - many of the insights I follow as an artist are a direct or an indirect result of my dancing, playing and listening. This is how I learn about timing, space, dynamics, texture, layers of experience, different states of being, levels of consciousness, the nature of creativity, self-invention and beauty. My work also presents a deeply rooted tendency towards the performative. This predisposition - possibly shaped in part by studying theatre in high-school and being profoundly impressed by the combination of avant-garde music and performance art that gained popularity in the 1980s - places a great significance on art as a shared experience. The meeting of audience and the art work, the art event as an encounter, and how it unfolds in time, have always been central to what I do. It is also embedded in the work itself as a formal interest in narrative and the structure of stories as a mould for human experience. The concept of the soundtrack carries a great significance too. As well as being partially related to the organisational trait of stories, it implies the separation of sound and image from their original context, dissecting perceptual reality and reassembling it together to make new realities and imaginary worlds. This complex, evocative gap between the seen and the heard, this vast poetic space, is where much of my creative work takes place."