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 mobilizes “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 an Arab-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.
If We Are For Ourselves Alone, What Are We? (Facing Our Failure), exhibited at Ruskin School of Art Degree Show, Oxford, UK (2026)
Unedited childhood footage (silent; 3 mins, 27 secs), childhood cassette player with modified looping cassette tape (12 mins),
perfume bottle mezuzah inscribed with international cities (containing BDS-compliant klaf)
Dimensions variable, images courtesy of Alexa Kanarowski
Sabon (2026)
Audio transducer, hollow steel, pine wood, grated hand-soap shavings
10 ft x 10 ft x 1.5 in, images courtesy of Alexa Kanarowski
Sabon is clad in shavings collected from grated bars of hand-soap, and by virtue of a hidden transducer, resonates loudly at a frequency of 1060Hz.
Building on the apocryphal claim that Nazis produced soap from Jewish victims, Sabon seeks to explore the fraught relationship between the memory of Nazi atrocities and contemporary notions of Jewish supremacy. In this context, soap operates as a dual symbol, at once evoking historical trauma, while also serving as an instrument of purification and cleansing, through which these tensions are examined.
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, images courtesy of Fatima Butt
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.
Memory Triptych (2025)
Reclaimed oak wood, monoprints (pyrography on rawhide goatskin)
53.5 in x 11.3 in x 3.5 in, images courtesy of Alexa Kanarowski
Study (2025)
Scrap wood, leaking mug, carved soap, thread, soap carvings, “sleepytime tea” dustings, salt, resonating mug
Dimensions variable, images courtesy of Alexa Kanarowski
The resonating mug loops the outro to “U R UR ONLY ACHING” (3:15 - 4:37) by British post-rock band 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, CA (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, images courtesy of Paul Litherland
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
View of Installation
Rainforest IV - 50th Anniversary Installation, exhibited at The Grand Theatre, Kingston, CA (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
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)