Muscle Memory

Solo at Rothschild
a space for solo exhibitions, created by the Edmond de Rothschild Center especially for members of the Edmond de Rothschild Center network. Its purpose is to foster the development of new projects and facilitate the production of existing works by providing curatorial guidance and encouraging group thinking processes.

A series of exhibitions about loss and processing
Three solo exhibitions at the Edmond de Rothschild Center, floor -1.
May-November 2025
Participants: Adi-Chen Jamui, Noga Sirota, Yuval Katz
Curators: Yaelle Ben-Ami, Yael Jacobs, Lital Bar Noy

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Yuval Katz | Muscle Memory
Curator: Lital Bar Noy

Yuval Katz (born 1997, Haifa) is a 3D artist and animator living and working in Tel Aviv. His short film 7 Missing was screened at international film festivals, including Annecy and Pictoplasma. In his work, Katz explores the intersection between the human and the technological, and the potential of the latter to carry emotion, memory and human warmth.
Katz places human and material warmth within digital worlds, which are often associated with alienation and coldness, thereby creating an intriguing synthesis of qualities, emotions, senses, and materials. Through a combination of video, animation, and 3D, Katz creates environments in which body and code, human and algorithmic movement, merge. These technological spaces, typically perceived as cold and distant, become in his work intimate sites, charged with emotion and physical experience.
Katz sees the 3D grid as a timeless space – an arena for deconstruction and reconstruction – in which the world can be processed from a human perspective. Through the fusion of personal narratives and universal experiences, he offers a new perspective on the relationships between man and machine, memory and matter, technology and consciousness.

In the video work “Muscle Memory,” Katz presents an anonymous figure reconstructing its memories. These memories/dreams manifest as performative dance sequences, representing not only personal memory but also a collective human memory: that which has been forgotten, repressed, or never put into words. The work draws inspiration from the genre of visual poetry: a poetic form of cinema in which visual elements are constructed as a sequence of non-narrative images that evoke feeling rather than tell a linear story. In Katz’s adaptation, the movements of live dancers were filmed, scanned, and translated into a 3D environment using computer-based techniques. The movements were reconstructed and combined with other gestures, creating a multi-performer dance that could exist only within the digital realm.
The concept of “Muscle Memory” suggests that the body itself carries movements, gestures, and rituals etched into it over time. These movements are rooted in states of discipline and ritual, such as marching, kneeling, and praying – which persist even after their original purpose has faded. In this way, bodily gestures become echoes of memory, traces of the body’s memory, even when the mind seeks to forget.
At the center of the work stands the writing figure, engaged in a process of mental detoxing, in which writing and reconstruction serve as tools for release. Through them, it creates an internal space in which experiences etched into the body can be processed – a space that does not exist in the external world but within consciousness itself, as an alternative realm for life under the shadow of ongoing fear. The structure of time in the video also becomes an arena for processing memory: the work moves from sunrise, through midday, to twilight, as an allegory of the human journey, from birth to death. The transitions between times of day and types of movement reflect shifting states of consciousness, life experiences, and bodily transformations.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw the body as a means of processing experiences of time and memory not only through cognitive awareness, but through a continuum of recurring experiences and movements. This notion resonates in Katz’s work, where the body functions as an active archive of humanity, carrying traces of what has been inscribed and preserved beyond verbal memory. Hence, the relationships between body, memory, and medium are reconfigured, creating a world in which consciousness seeks a way to revive what has been buried in the body and to imagine a different possible space for life.