The spotlight shines, drums and a trumpet flare. The tightrope walkers, the trainers, the elephants and horses, acrobats above, lions below, and the crowd roars! The circus begins! And I am at the center, legs spread wide, with the entire spectacle, the dreams and the fantasies, invading the arena through me.
I have been collecting junk and dolls for as long as I can remember—invading abandoned houses and rooting through piles of trash. I grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to the municipal zoo in Petah Tikva, which housed lions, elephants, bears, and giraffes. Truly a jungle just over the hill.
In the zoo compound was a Zoological Museum with taxidermied animals, a natural history "Freak Show": a spotted cheetah, frozen mid-pounce with dust on its fur; a massive polar bear exposing menacing teeth, its mouth filled with spiderwebs. An outlandish and disturbed place. Opposite it was the Museum of the Human Body, where there were formalin jars holding real fetuses from various months of pregnancy, disembodied eyes floating in glass containers, lungs, a heart, and all sorts of other things.
Nearly 30 figures, acrobats, props, and arenas comprise the circus, all created from reused objects.
This deep-seated fascination with the discarded, the forgotten, and the bizarre naturally found its outlet in my art. The Circus is built from these reclaimed objects – toys and junk that are given a second life. Through the logic of the Ready-Made, these fragments of pop culture and consumption are elevated, transforming refuse into a vehicle for emotional narrative.
The very act of creating this theatrical world from salvaged materials is a clear nod to the artist Alexander Calder, whose seminal Calder's Cirque – a miniature circus constructed from wire, string, and simple found materials – demonstrated the power of the ready-made object to capture life and movement.
2011 – Only when I finished creating and installing the circus in the exhibition could I look at it from a distance and discover that I had created my very first portrait.
2025 – It was then that I finally understood: this incredible, fantastic show was actually the one I had been creating ever since, and the "Circus" piece was a harbinger of that discovery.
Photos: Eric Sultan