Naama Tsabar lives and works in New York. Tsabar employs sculpture, photography, and performance to subvert the gender roles historically associated with musicianship. Appropriating and subverting the aggressive gestures of rock and roll and their associations with virility and power, Tsabar upends the implicit gender roles and coded behavior of music and nightlife.
Her most recent works and sonic installations weave together iconic actions and objects from rock music (the guitar, the amplifier, the microphone) with a more intimate portrayal of the artist’s body and its movement through, within, and into the surrounding architecture. The motifs of femininity, gender, disruption, destruction and reconstruction recur throughout her work and performances.
Tsabar has most recently performed at ELEVATION 1049 in Gstaad, Switzerland, in February 2019, and exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv in 2018, Kunsthaus Baselland in 2018, and Prospect New Orleans in 2017 with the commissioned piece Composition 21. Upcoming exhibitions and festivals include Big Orchestra at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt this summer and at the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina this September.
Selected exhibitions and performances of Tsabar include Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires, (2018); SoundKraft at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2017-18); The Skin of Sound, Hessel Museum of Art / CCS Bard, New York (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); High Line Art, New York (2016); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2013, 2010); Frieze Projects, New York (2014); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2014); MARTE-C, San Salvador (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2010); The Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Herzliya (2006). Tsabar received her MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2010 and BFA from Hamidrasha School of Arts, Belt-Berl, Israel, in 2004. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv; Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Tsabar currently lives and works in New York.
Learn more about Naama’s work at her website: naamatsabar.com.
