mothertongues
mothertongues is Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye.
Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amateur scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.
Meital Yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, israel) is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist whose practice embodies language, performance, and video. Yaniv’s labor weaves and merges the personal and the political to find the common thread in disparate struggles, connecting ideas, bodies, and forms of resistance. Since 2015, Yaniv has been organizing intimate reading events with the aim of conceiving alternative communities where vulnerability holds us all accountable. Her book, Spectrum for an Untouchable, was published in October 2016. She has performed and exhibited at Hummer Museum, MCASD (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego), Human Resources, LACA (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive), The Situation Room, Visitor Welcome Center, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), PØST, Mana Contemporary, and Wendy’s Subway, among others. She has been published by Los Angeles Review of Books’ Voluble Channel, Nonsensical, Ladyscumbag, Entropy Magazine, Graphite Journal, and notes on looking, with reviews by Huffington Post, LA Weekly, Bitch Media, KCET Artbound, and Fabrik Magazine. Yaniv holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. meitalyaniv.com
Kim Ye (b. 1984, Beijing, China) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates performance, video, sculpture, installation, and text. She received her MFA from UCLA (2012) and her BA from Pomona College (2007). Influenced by language and aesthetics from BDSM, drag, and other avenues for self-actualization, her work explores the inversion of power dynamics through creating situations of exchange and intimacy. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at The Hammer Museum, Getty Center, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Material Art Fair, Human Resources, Machine Project, Morán Morán, Satellite Art Fair, and Visitor Welcome Center among others. As a visiting artist, she has taught and lectured at institutions such as Cal Arts, Pomona College, University of California Los Angeles, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Loyola Marymount University. KimYe.com