portfolio
Adam Ben David (b. 2000, Montréal) is a Jewish-Canadian artist working across sound, text, performance 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.
There is Daylight Beyond This Skin (2026)
Text seared onto rawhide goatskin, covered window, rotting wood, rusted nails
56.5 in x 54.5 in
There is Daylight Beyond This Skin enacts, verbatim, an op-ed issued by the artist’s high school administration, some months after his graduation.
It seeks to confront the material reality of institutional violence.
Untitled (2026)
Hollow steel, pine wood, grated hand-soap shavings, transducer, radio receiver
10 ft x 10 ft x 1.5 in
Untitled is clad in shavings collected from grated bars of hand-soap, and by virtue of a hidden transducer, resonates with the sound of a real-time radio scanning for a signal, shifting between static as it searches and moments of clarity when it briefly connects.
Memory Triptych (2025)
Reclaimed oak wood, monoprints (pyrography on rawhide goatskin)
53.5 in x 11.3 in x 3.5 in
Study (2025)
Scrap wood, leaking mug, carved soap, thread, soap carvings, “sleepytime tea” dustings, salt, resonating mug
Dimensions variable
The mug resonates perpetually, looping the outro (3:15 - 4:37) to “U R UR ONLY ACHING” by caroline.
Untitled, October (2025)
Original poem, engraved goat skin, charcoal powder inlay
7.95 in × 5.43 in
Stained Glass (2025)
Original prose, engraved goat skin, light box
7.3 in x 4.2 in
Flinch (2025)
Original prose, engraved goat skin, light box
6.7 in x 3.6 in
Performance: “The Shared Labour of Storytelling” (Excerpt)
Audiovisual Projection (Excerpt)
Look How We Wander, exhibited at Produit Rien, Montréal (November 2024)
Max/MSP, 4-channel sound installation (64 minutes, looped)
Iron hand-wheel, olive wood, plastic tarp, pomegranate juice-dyed pine, recycled tin & aluminium cans
35 in x 29 in x 14 in
Sculpture and sound by Adam Ben David
Film by Lougien Dawoudiah
Look How We Wander is a rejection of imperialist narratives. Through a sound piece constructed of personal, cultural and religious recordings, Ben David works to distinguish between his Jewishness and its politicization, specifically as a function of Zionist violence. Simultaneously, Palestinian artist Lougien Dawoudiah’s film captures her experience between grief, numbness, and survival as an exiled Palestinian in the digital age, stitching together personal videos, banal browsing/procrastination, and distressing news segments. Both artists share the labour of storytelling with the audience by inviting them to crank the interactive hand-wheel that reveals the audiovisuals. Both the audio and video works continue to elapse regardless of activation.
BANDAGES (2023)
Single-channel video (short film), miniDV
(2 minutes, 57 seconds)
Performance and soundtrack by Adam Ben David (as thenheturnedaround)
Cinematography and direction by Michael Osei
BANDAGES finds himself somewhere in the space between harm, self-loathing, rebirth, and hope.
View of Installation
Rainforest IV - 50th Anniversary Installation, exhibited at The Grand Theatre, Kingston (June 2023)
Steel rain gauge, transducer, soundscape composition
17.1 in x 8.3 in (hollow cylinder)
10.8 in x 8.3 in (cover)
Robert Appleton, James Bailey, Adam Ben David, Anne Bourne, Laura Jean Cameron, Liam Cole, Dimitri Georgaras, Chris Hemer, Sarah Jihae Kaye, Matt Rogalsky, Amanda Tschanz, Renata van Vliet
Fifty years after the original historic 1973 workshop installed by David Tudor and friends, a group of 13 sound artists learn about the piece through making, performing and discussing it. The rain gauge shares a physical space with a myriad of other resonating objects, creating a rainforest-esque soundscape.
The Sound of Solitude, exhibited at the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts, Kingston, Canada (February 2020)
Perpetual 4-channel sound installation, home recordings, ambisonic microphone
Dimensions variable
Electroacoustic composition students at Queen’s University recorded their nearby indoor and outdoor surroundings, capturing sounds reflective of their new life during the first two weeks of the pandemic lockdown. Throughout the soundscape, an ambisonic microphone captures the sound of rain falling from ceiling speakers and is a sustained theme throughout the piece. Four monitors surround the microphone as it records the remaining sporadic elements of the collected recordings: conversations among family members, walks around empty streets, televisions entertaining stay-at-home students. Finally, a subtle drone, designed from the sound of a spoon falling to the floor (and subsequently processed by various effects) creates a 360° panning effect, rotating around the listener.
DEPAKOTE (2024)
A film by Celine Koma
Scored by Adam Ben David (as thenheturnedaround)
To Show A Goldfish The World (2023)
A film by Celine Koma
Scored by Adam Ben David (as thenheturnedaround)