Eyal Agivayev | The Pigeon

Electrical boxes, sidewalks, broken objects, animals, pipes, and kurkar stones – these are just some of the objects explored in Eyal Agivayev’s work. Some of these he photographs, others he sculpts, and others still he groups together as found images. In his artistic practice, Agivayev dwells on the contrast between aesthetics and ugliness and between the margins and the center in the urban context. Turning the spotlight on the very areas that the eye tends to skip over, he offers new ways of reading them.
In the work featured here, he does this by focusing on a common and often reviled urban animal: the pigeon. This work consists of two images. The first: a photograph of asphalt covered with pigeon droppings, displayed on the floor. The second: a close-up of pigeon feathers, framed and mounted on  one of the museum’s exterior walls. The tension between the two images and their abstraction into a colorful physical experience echoes the mundane presence of pigeons in everyday life and the possibility to look at them differently. “Both photographs,” explains the artist, “juxtapose the dirty with the meticulous, the documentation of the quotidian with a new urban iconography.”