Doron was born in 1953 in the city of Givatayim. He studied art at Talma Yalin and Tel Aviv University and art management at the University of Haifa. Completed advanced studies in creative drama in Berlin and London. He worked for the Maytal and Arieli advertising companies and he was in charge of community activities of the Israel Electric Corporation. He is the founder of Projective and Artura, which are committed to promoting public and community art as well as events that link science to art. Projects include the construction of a major sculpture gardens in hospice areas.
Polak is also the Israeli representative on the International Artists’ Museum, a global umbrella group of artists that helps to develop multinational art projects, since 1993. Through the Artists’ Museum Polak recruited artists to participate in shows at the Kassel Documenta in Germany, the Orensanz Center in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, and the Habitat Center in New Delhi, in the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York, he curated multi-media installation exploring issues of home, displacement, and reconstruction, etc. To date, he has organized more than 300 exhibitions in Israel and more than 50 overseas. As a curator, Polak pairs the works of Jewish and Arab Israeli artists and makes them travel internationally. His projects involving Arab and Jewish Israeli artists carry a message dialogue and peace.
About the Doron Polak performance “A VIRTUAL MEMORIAL VILNIUS 2013“
It took place on the 25th of September, 2013, in the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum within the frames of the IV World Litvak Congress as the part of the Shoa Film Festival, coordinated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne. The confrontation between alive and the dead body: this might be the essence of the self retrieval and the remembrance. The travel of the body, which was born only 8 years after the atrocities: from the thoughts of young and naive boy, looking for the family roots in the free country, tortured by the wars. The trip as the Sisyphus trial to understand the stories of nondescript cruelty…
About his work
As an artist, Doron Polak specializes in performance and outdoor art – examines the position of the body in relation to disaster and loss. The inspiration for his artistic research stems from his personal confrontation with the past of his family who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Doron explores the limits of the use of the body, he examines himself, his body and his surroundings, in a extreme and absurd way, and allows all taboos to be broken down, he photographies the nudity in public spaces in the dark of night, and the confrontation of the body with the world. He creates something from nothing, to notice news colors, textures, and substances.
“I expand the limits of the use of the body. I examine myself, my body, my surroundings. I become addicted to the craziness. I am attracted to the extreme and the absurd. I allow all bridges and taboos to be broken down.” Doron Polak
“via the artistic creation, in a very large sence of the term, art can offer us keys to read and perhaps better understand “US” as a collective of identities , and their accumulation of experiences with in a world of end less situations…” Margalit Berriet
“The body has long been referenced by artists as a source of inspiration and interpretation. Doron Polak takes his art to the ultimate level by actually using his own body in creating his art. Working in the nude, he creates an environment in collaboration with other artists. Unlike tradition performance art which involves a relationship between performer and audience, Doron has no audience, “performing” instead for video and still cameras.” Shalom Nauman
Jewish identity in examining the meaning of the body and its secrets
The artistic project ”Bodies” has accompanied Doron for over twenty years as part of a process of personal understanding of the deep secrets entombed within the body, within behavior connected to its very existence within the boundaries of his life as a Jew, and the broader meaning, that he symbolically, can and need to deduct from that process. The connection between experience, Jewish identity and the body has always been related for him to pain, suffering, hardships of coping and mental adjustment, and has also been physical - one against many, few against those that surround them.
In his work, all objects meet his my body, with his presence in the space, with his representation, as a mature adult, nude and totally emerged in life and its desires. The artistic examination will expand the meaning of the term religion, in a deep and honest suggestive process, free of known and existing rules. On the other hand, it is clear that he is physically examining these things as a Jewish person, an Israeli citizen, living and working in Israel in the third millennium, son of Holocaust survivors, a man who served in the Israeli army, an artist living on the earth that bore his decendants and on which he lives his life.