Hagara Ben Yishay

Artist Statement

Hagara Ben Yishay is a Berlin-based artist and designer whose practice is built from images that already exist. Whether she is working in digital collage, on the street or with artificial intelligence, she cuts found and bought pictures apart and sets them beside things they never met, so that the sweet image and the bad dream share one frame.

Since 2026 her practice has moved into new media. In The Robot and Me, a series documented at therobotand.me, she works with AI systems as collaborators. In some works the machine composes and she cuts; in others she hands it her own records and it writes back. The series asks the oldest question in collage with new urgency: when every part was made by someone else, what makes the result one's own?

Trained in interaction design at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv, she spent more than a decade designing digital products for international technology companies while keeping a second practice at night. That practice began on the street. From 2011 to 2016 she made stencils and paste-ups in Tel Aviv, alone and as one half of the duo Pixel Ninja with Tomer Resheff. Two of the duo's wall paintings remain on permanent view in The Seventh Floor, the street-art exhibition at Tel Aviv's New Central Bus Station.

From 2012 she has made digital collage under the name Hagara Stuff, assembled in Photoshop from stock photographs she bought, free-to-use images from libraries such as Unsplash and pictures from old magazines, and drawn from American pop material: tattoos, fashion magazines and graphic art. The work was shown in three solo exhibitions in Tel Aviv in 2017, among them Hagara Stuff at Kuli Alma, and in group exhibitions including Prime Time at the Castiel Compound in 2013. Her work is held in private collections worldwide.

Alongside her own exhibitions, she has made collages on commission for the guest rooms of the Muse Boutique Hotel in Tel Aviv and for Violeta boutique in Barcelona. She created the artwork and identity for the group exhibition Message On A Bottle, in which she also showed.

She has taught collage in Berlin, leading a workshop built on one rule: there are no rules.draft