Navot Miller, the architect student who came to Berlin found the art world and became an artist. In strong colours, Navot captures architectural and spatial moments, embodied by men (for the most part). With a religious touch to it. He tells us about sexual exploration, his source of inspiration, upcoming projects, and how to style peyos! They’re cute and apparently easy to groom!

Where are you from and where are you based today?
I was born in Israel in a small village called Shadmot Mehola. I grew up in a remote part of the country where agricultural and orthodox Jewish lifestyles dominate the daily life and I like to think about my childhood in the small village—100 families on top of a hill—as something that stands in contrast to the lifestyle I have nowadays. By saying that I don't mean my childhood was bad, it was mostly good, however I was always a weird character in the context of rural life. I moved to Berlin roughy 6 years ago, 2 days after finishing my mandatory military service in Israel and, in a nutshell, I can say (similarly to what Patti Smith said about NYC) that Berlin “De-, and Re-formed me”.

Moving to Berlin I remember my Tinder radar was still set up to find men and women. I remember I had no interest in art and almost no knowledge about the art scene in Berlin whatsoever. I moved to Berlin mainly because I wanted to study architecture. Meeting inspiring people I was often exposed to skills and ideas that triggered me to capture moments of my life in a variety of ways such as photography, video, drawing and sound recording. Fast forward 6 years - I am a permanent member in the art community KuLe Kunsthaus in Mitte and I study fine arts in UDK.

Tell me a bit about your background, personally and professionally!
Born to a modern orthodox Jewish family my life as a kid was mostly positive. Surrounded by nature I liked leaving the house with an empty bucket and returning when it was full with mushrooms I had collected in the hills around my house. My father is quite of a dominant figure in our family; he is a farmer and therefore my teen years were dominated by hours of working outdoors in wheat fields, orchards, vineyards, olive groves and dairy farms. Celebrating Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13 was when it started to get clearer for me that I had “weird” feelings towards some of the boys with whom I grew up and this is when I started experimenting with some of the them as I sensed similar interests. Late at night we would sneak into the public swimming pool of the village, we would talk quietly, laugh about silly things and touch each other for longer periods of time than usual.

We didn't know how to call it if it was to be called or labeled as something. It felt like a temporary attraction. High school ended and military service started and during 3 years I had little time to think about my sexuality but roughly a year and a half into my service I got a week off and I traveled to Berlin with another friend. Visiting Berlin for the second time in my life, I remember being quite passive and neutral while bing there as I tried to relax from an intense militant schedule. I read about a club called Berghain and I told my friend we should check it out. Surprisingly we got into the club which was the first time in my life a gorgeous tattooed man sucked me off In a darkroom (I didn't know such places exists).

Very overwhelmed I went back to military in Israel with this experience resonating in my head and 4 months after I had another week vacation during which I returned to Berlin (how could I not) by myself and I remember how comfortable I felt. Shortly before my military service ended, at the age of 22, my father commented to me one night while I was at home: “You know, Navot, If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” I waited until my mother showed up and simply announced that “I think I am in love with a guy”. Their reaction was more understanding than what I’d expected and both of them demonstrated support mixed with confusion and uncertainty. Moving to Berlin my goal was to study architecture and therefore most of my first year in town was attending German school in which I met a person named Joel Mu who, among many other positive anecdotes, introduced me to the art scene and gay culture in Berlin.

The interest I had in architecture steadily grew but simultaneously the artistic approach to it was what I mostly focused on and so I started drawing what I thought was architecture. The first art school I went to was where I met two important mentors who slowly guided me towards the arts and less for architecture and that shaped a couple of key behaviors in me such as the approach to beauty and why it matters less when people criticize work by saying that something is beautiful or not. I remember spending days in outdoor public spaces that inspired me. I would go to a place with a sad book and music in my headphones, read and cry and observe the movement of people within a space. I was and am inspired by sadness.

You’re an artist in painting and video, how come these two different medias? What do you like about them?
I remember starting drawing at a very young age. I liked visuals and whenever I’d see an advertisement in the newspaper that was attractive to me, I would take a piece of paper with markers and pencils and copy it. I had notebooks full of drawings I made and as I advanced I experimented more freely with my hands to a point where I liked to combine lines drawn with a ruler together with lines drawn without. As the visual aspect of what I saw and heard started to dominate me I started photographing spaces that contains movement, shadow and light, positive and negative and so on.

Contrast. Opposite colors. Working with photography it was a matter of time until I started recording sounds and observing moments in public spaces. Taking videos of banal routines is an act I do almost daily without noticing, it is more of a habit than a form of making art. After some time I would sit down and look at the footage I collected and together with sound pieces I start creating a short clip; a collage; a summary; a video about the people I fucked, the places I visited, antisemitic attacks, trains, cranes and more. My work is exhibited using a variety of platforms, including Instagram, galleries, presentations and public spaces. I will often focus on placement of the works in a space, curation of works according to the exhibition space and I like to adapt and modify myself and my work according to the space and context.

Any favourite piece of art?
A couple actually. My classmate Max Göran made a great video piece recently and presented it in one of the classrooms in our academy as an installation combining metal scaffoldings in a dark room. the piece was shown during our academy’s last open studio days and in my honest opinion that work is a winner. The soundtrack of the video has Enya’s “Caribbean Blue” in it so I am all set. More famous, classic works that I genuinely like to stare at are David Hockney’s “portrait of an artist” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Man in polyester suit”.

You have or have had peyos, is it according a Jewish custom or simply for the style and look?
The idea of growing peyos was formed after a visit in LA in late 2016 during which I enjoyed seeing orthodox Jews walking freely and being an active part of a daily scenery of the city without much excitement or surprise on people’s faces when noticing the peyos. It was as if someone wore a white T-Shirt. It felt right and normal. As a religious kid I did observe Jewish rules; I wore a kippah, I kept Kosher, went to synagogue and so on, but I never had peyos and the more I thought about it the more I liked it visually.

It might be seen as a provocative move to grow peyos as a non-observant Jew however my take on that is A) I like it B) I think that people should see this and get used to seeing Jews in other forms of life apart from the stigmas and the prejudiced thoughts that people often have regarding Jewish life or Jews as one specific thing. A gay Jew with peyos wow HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!?!? A Jew with peyos eating Pork! A Jew with bleached peyos without a kippah. People fetishize “Jews” as so so so many, silly, rootless things that many of us have become used to hearing silly “rumors” about Jews.

I’ll give an example. In my last workplace I had a swiss colleague that lived in NYC for some time and when him and I got close to each other and felt more comfortable he started to ask me questions about Judaism. The best one out of a few was the one when he asked me if it is true that Jews are not good with reparing things at home, for example replacing a light bulb that is not working anymore. He assumed the Jew would not know how to handle it and will have to call a non-Jewish professional to do it. “Sure, of course.” I said, “It’s famous about us.” Regarding the peyos I will simply answer that it’s a mix of my Jewish identity and personal style.

How do you do them, curl iron? Hairspray?
It is kind of easy tbh, since my hair is naturally curly I just started shaving my head but leaving the side parts untrimmed and so slowly, slowly it was formed into these side curls. I must say that the beginning was quite terrible though. Most of the days when it was just a group of unshaved hair I looked like a mix of Krusty the clown from the Simpsons plus Sid the Sloth from Ice Age and these weird emperor penguins with the yellow hair on their head. But then they grew longer and got the natural shape of long curls so these days it is kind of cute and easy to groom.

By now they are so conveniently long so when my bf and I have sex I can tie them above my head. :-) Most days when I wake up I’d shower, comb them and simply let them dry to their natural look. I kinda want to re-bleach them, perhaps pink or green. Not sure though.

What’s next, do you have any upcoming art projects you wanna share with us?
I got a little grant to travel to Madagascar next year to document trees and record sounds and I am excited about that. I’m giving a talk about antisemitism in South Bank center this October so I am also looking forward to that, and this December I am going to spend a couple of weeks in a studio in Tijuana (for the first time) and planning on mostly documenting aspects of wealth, poverty and a wall.