#mylifeisamazing Series -
My #mylifeisamazing series is inspired by the complex and often overwhelming world of social media, and in particular, the way in which it distorts our understanding of happiness and success. Through a series of paintings, I aim to explore the radicalizing and flattening effects of social media on our pursuit of joy, drawing on images collected from various sources online to create exaggerated scenes of happiness and contentment. By highlighting the shallowness and fakery of social media empathy and admiration, my work challenges us to question the way we engage with these platforms and to consider the true nature of happiness. This project was preceded by a study on happiness, a study that eventually led me to the conclusion that knowing how to be truly happy, is a skil, a talent. My art invites viewers to reflect on what it means to cultivate that skill in an era dominated by social media and the pursuit of superficial validation.
”People often don’t make it a top priority to make time for doing the things that they say make them ”happy,” like spending time with family and friends. ”They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.” Daniel Kahneman
I have exhibited this series of collage paintings alongside an interactive network-based project that invites viewers to engage with pressing issues such as gender inequality in the art world through the use of feedback devices and social media-inspired icons that represent satisfaction, enjoyment, and opinion. With real-time graphical analysis of viewer responses, this project aims to challenge our understanding of how we engage with and respond to art, and encourages us to question the structures of power and inequality that continue to shape the art world today.
Inbar Hasson -Artist statement
I am disturbed and concerned by the general numbness in our society.
In art I seek to punch/address this drowsiness that we can’t afford.
I am a multidisciplinary artist with an educational background in figurative painting, interior architecture and Middle East studies. This background has shaped my practice. My painting training provided me with technical skills to execute my ideas. My interior architecture experience along with sensitivity and fascination with composition helps me to create my “narrative spaces.” Finally, my academic education and my interest in history and socio-political matters – a knowledge that arouses in me restlessness – floods me with stories and ideas that I want to share.
I believe that a work of art first and foremost evokes in us a physical sensation. A feeling which we then label with names, emotions that we describe with words. Concrete thoughts and ideas follow later. My painting practice is very physical, the choice of a large scale is very sincere. It stems from a physical need, and from the personal satisfaction it involves. When I create, I think about the physical experience and body sensation I would like the work to evoke.
These experiences may be the result of discomfort, confusion, embarrassment or disorientation. Is the image funny or grotesque? What brings these two figures together? Is it suppressed rage or apathie? This zone of “in-betweenness” is my playground.
I am attracted to strength and impact, and I am consciously focused on how I could capture the viewer’s attention through my art, and how I could create for her a space to feel.
I ask myself: Have we really become what Simon Anholt calls ”cultural psychopaths”?
How did we become so numb towards each other? Do we actually feel ourselves?
Inbar Hasson, short bio
With a background in interior design and Middle-Eastern studies, multi-disciplinary artist Inbar Hasson has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2011. As a graduate of the Wackers Academy of Arts in Amsterdam, Hasson devoted herself to large-scale painting and collage, in which she seeks a tension between an appealing visual storytelling and a sense of discomfort and disorientation. Both confronting and seducing, she demands from the viewer an active gaze, rewarded with an emotional impact. Recently, Hasson has been developing a series of new projects under the title Background Check, where she focuses on notions of social inequality
Hasson currently exhibiting in Arte Laguna prize Venice, in the past in she exhibited in the Netherlands, New York and Israel in both solo and group shows