Joseph Dadoune

Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune, born in Nice (France) on the 24th of April 1975, is an artist whose protean work combines video, photography, performance, drawing, painting, sound production, installation and architecture.
His practice is permeated by the tensions between the Eastern and Western world, between religious and secular life, between central power and the periphery, between the real and the imaginary. He brings together the intimate body and political body, the desire for protection and social action, housing and individuality, territory and confinement, in works that resonate with questions of exile, gender and identity.
In a utopian dimension of art, he is particularly interested in post-colonial issues and contemporary symbolic violence, drawing on the past and the sacred, which he formally links to the present. Establishing that all materiality carries its own symbolic charge, and thus carries an ancient semantics, he offers to question and cross time, sometimes resorting to strangeness, to a kind of manifestation of the invisible, and thus finding "a way to show by hiding, to preserve the truth".
Following a childhood that brought him from Nice to the development town of Ofakim in Israel's Negev desert, Dadoune became known in the early 2000s, in both France and Israel, for his film Zion (2006–07), produced with the support and participation of the Louvre. Actress Ronit Elkabetz is the main character, playing an allegory of Jerusalem.
In 2008, he developed a cycle of works entitled In the Desert in which he explored the economic, social, and cultural reality of Ofakim. For the project, Dadoune produced films, gathered archival documents, initiated guided tours, invited journalists, and tried to harness as many people as possible to deliver Ofakim from its status as a "non-place".
In 2010 he began to focus on drawing and created monumental surfaces slathered in tar that he also added to various objects and materials. Some of these tar pieces were exhibited at Fondation d'entreprise Ricard in Paris and at Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel.
Among his other striking pieces are the noteworthy Impossible Calendars (2013), exhibited at Tel Aviv Museum of Art for the 100th anniversary of Dada, and Barrière protectrice (2017), a series of autobiographical war drawings published as a book by Éditions Arnaud Bizalion.
In 2017, he was named a Knight of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture, and in July that year, his project An Arab Spring (comprising 233 photographs and 17 videos) was added to the collections of the Parisian Centre Pompidou. In October 2017, Dadoune was the invited artist for the City of Versailles Night of Creation, where he presented a pivotal selection of works under the title Sillons. In 2018, he received the art prize from Fondation Renée et Léonce Bernheim.
In 2015, flowers produced on paper in pastel emerged in Joseph Dadoune's work. Charcoal flowers carrying life and death ("Fleurs / After War. Blind Spot / Tel Aviv", 2015-2016); flowers in bright and varied colours evoking exile ("Lost Roots/Lost Memory/We New", 2017) or the encounter with the Other ("Found you", 2022). In 2023, with the series "Fleurs/camouflages, périphérie", Joseph Dadoune displayed his charcoal drawings on large limewood panels. These flowers echo the plants that survive with virtually no water on the edge of the desert: palm trees, thistles and asphodels. For Lucia Sagradini-Neumann: “The use and choice of paper and pencil that relate to the fragility of the form, and the choice of motif - the vulnerable, graceful flower - bear the marks of the intemperance of our times”.
Joseph Dadoune has taken part in over 200 solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the United States, India and the Middle East. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Espace Richaud in Versailles, the Plateau / FRAC Ile-de-France (Regional Fund for Contemporary Art) and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, the Petah Tikva Museum of Art and the Kolkata Center for Creativity in India, during the Indian Art Fair. His videos have been shown at the Musée de la chasse et de la Nature, the Auditorium of the Musée du Louvre, the Palais de Tokyo and at the White Box NYC.
Among the group exhibitions and international fairs in which he has taken part, we can mention the FIAC and the Pernod-Ricard Foundation in Paris, the Tel Aviv Museum of Fine Arts and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Busan Biennial in South Korea, Le Louvre Lens, the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina and the Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival in the United Arab Emirates.
Dadoune's works are included in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, the Louvre, and FIAC in Paris, as well as FRAC Normandy Rouen, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel.