Adam Ben David

Adam Ben David (b. 2000, Montréal) is a Jewish-Canadian artist working across sound, text, and sculptural installation. His practice moves between sonic composition and material labour to explore grief, loneliness and the fragilities of human connection. Drawing on a tense Jewish adolescence that oscillated between institutional indoctrination and warm religious ritual, Ben David engages the gestures, instability and angst of that formative period. Reclaiming a label often projected onto him, he mobilises “emo-ness” as both a formal and affective device: a confessional method for making the interior legible. Working with the historical and stereotypical figure of Jewish wandering, Ben David navigates absence, longing, and the desire for community, while reclaiming a Mizrahi-Jewish lineage nearly erased by colonial projects. In resistance to Zionism’s separation of diasporic Jews from their neighbours, Ben David’s work asks how art might connect us to a Jewishness beyond nationalism, and in turn, to those around us.

Personal website.