Ive Tabar is one of the more visible artists working in the specific field of medical performance in the context of body-art or live-art among other internationally acclaimed artists of the field like Orlan, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Kira O'Reilly, Stelarc, Franco B, Ron Athey. Tabar draws his performance themes from his everyday work at the Izola General Hospital. The central figure of his artistic and metaphysical interest is the border between life and death, which he encounters on a daily basis. His medical performances are physically extremely demanding, poetically charged and politically explicitly radical. In his younger years, when he was working as a male nurse in traumatology at the local hospital, he recognised the hospital environment as a medium for his artistic expression. One of his first recognisable yet less known works was a series of X-ray autoportrait with a crucifix and a chain, which was exhibited at the local parish church or a series of 180 found X-ray footages of different subjects all quite the same in the X-ray vision. Ive Tabar began to use his body in explicit ways under the patronage of Kapelica Gallery. Thought his work the incentive is based on his firm ethical stance that all people are equal and that politics and capital divide them.
