YONAT VAKS

Yonat Vaks is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Barcelona. 

She was born and raised in an Israeli kibbutz, a community based on communist idealogy. Growing up in a children's house and seeing her parents a few hours each  day had a profound impact on how her worldview was constructed.

Art and creation were an inherent part of her life, since she could hold a paintbrush. Sometimes it was the only place she felt herself. Vaks studied fine art in high school and was so in tune to her artistic side in such a way that full artworks would come to her in dreams. However, in her early twenties, an unexpected turn led her to shift from art school to investigate her inner world through breath work practices.

The practices and methods of accessing altered states of consciousness are now widely popular, but at the time were very niche. These experiences and the realization  that our concepts of reality are based on what we learned to believe about the world changed her life in a radical way. Vaks pursued this path for almost a decade, studying and becoming a certified practitioner. After a decade of profound transformation and deep experiences of the human psyche, she felt it was time for another turn in life, back to her artistic practice. 

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In 2010, she moved to Barcelona to study art and has been building her artistic trajectory ever since. The decade previous to this and its experiences have been a cornerstone of her artistic practice. Moving to a different country has broadened this investigation into the impacts of culture, language and local traditions on our collective psyche.

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Watching her home country and the world transform dramatically in recent years have further deepened this search into our collective beliefs and what the future might look like if we strip ourselves from our perceived 'truths´. Both an outer journey as well as a deep, painful inward journey, this has driven her to connect her art to her knowledge of altered states of consciousness in a new way. This transformation is still a work in progress and it is influencing the core of her creative process. It is becoming more intuitive, more emotional and more accepting of the serendipitous nature of life.

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Vaks´ work has been exhibited globally, from galleries and festivals in the United States, Europe and the digital frontier. She is a seasoned speaker on art, technology, and the future and has delivered talks at TEDx, the Mobile World Congress and in many private engagements about the future of art in the times we are living in. ​​​