Escape Will Get You Tonight, 2025

Solo exhibition in Kav 16 Gallery, curated by Nir Evron

There is an old saying that if you meet your double, you should kill him before he kills you. Though varied in its retellings and lacking a single attributable source, this phrase captures a deeply ingrained cultural and psychological belief: that our doubles—or "others"—serve as dark reflections of ourselves, possessing intentions that may be as malevolent as they are seductive.

When Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin in Dostoevsky's The Double encounters his own double, he is shocked yet irresistibly drawn in, sensing both his reflection and his rival in this alternate self. In Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson attempts to resurrect his lost love, Madeleine, by reshaping Judy into her image—obliterating Judy's identity in favor of an illusion that replaces reality. In Psycho, Norman Bates suffers from a split personality, where his "mother" persona acts out repressed, violent impulses he cannot express in his conscious self. And in Mulholland Drive, Betty arrives in Hollywood with dreams of fame, only to encounter a woman named Rita who becomes both her double and her obsession. As their identities begin to blur, their doubling questions the stability of identity itself. In each case, the double—whether as look-alike, counterpart, shadow-self, or doppelgänger—becomes a mirror of hidden desires and fears, merging internal conflict with external form.

Noa Simhayof Shahaf's work invents and assembles fragmented scenarios, characters, objects and sets, layering concepts that blur boundaries and definitions. Escape Will Catch You Tonight stands as a meditation on the difficulty in breaking free from concrete definitions of inside and outside, original and copy—the very structures that uphold our sense of self. The possibility—and here, perhaps tragically, the impossibility—of such an escape is embedded in Simhayof Shahaf's deliberate use of the "cut", an act of editing that brings disparate elements together and, as a result, stitches the viewers—unwillingly—into the narrative and into the relationships between the filmed characters and their surroundings.

A professional Elvis impersonator lives with his parents in a small apartment, his everyday life punctuated by the realities of war in Israel. A breakout room spirals out of control as its operators engage in ambiguous, unfocused actions, culminating in a loud, distorted electric guitar performance. In another sequence, the impersonator's mother recounts a past encounter with a phantom-like presence, while yet another Elvis, now aging, takes the stage. Together, these scenes illustrate how identity fractures under the pressure of repetition, imitation, and the struggle for authenticity. The video work depicts doubles not only as reflections but as active agents who blur distinctions between self and other, inside and outside, identity and illusion.

The night I finished writing this text, the song Escape Will Always Fail by Poliana Frank (Elliot/Sharon Ben Ezer) from 1991 came to mind. The song opens with the words: "I hear the next war coming, awake all night, smell the blood"—words that have stayed with me since I first heard them and continue to resonate with me from time to time. The war is already here, and once again, we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of repetition. I stopped writing. When I resumed, it was clear to me: escape had caught me that night.


Text provided by curater, Nir Evron.