LandEscape Art Review // Special Issue

LandEscape A r t

R e v i e w

Anniversary Edition

MILANA YALIR MEHDI FARAJPOUR SAPIR KESEM LEARY ARIANE LITTMAN CLAIRE WILLIAMS MAX EPSTEIN TAL AMITAI LAVI JULIA SIX STEFY MCKNIGHT 2016, performed at Sala HIROSHIMA of Barcelona A work by

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SUMMARY

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C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

R e v i e w

Milana Yalir

Tal Amitai Lavi

Mehdi Farajpour

Sapir Kesem Leary

Ariane Littman

Julia Six

Israel

Israel

France

Israel

Israel

USA

Within the years Milana created projects in the fields of dance, choreography, video art and visual arts was commissioned by museums in Europe created films for local media channels and directed workshops in various art fields. Milana has participated in productions of the Dutch National Opera as a dancer, acrobat and actress she received the support of the technical department of the National Opera and Ballet Theatre House in Amster-dam for her video art works.

Milana's art pieces and productions are multimedia based with integration of dance she redesigns the space in real time. Milana is working with interactive elements and collaborates with various artists from different art fields as well as with composers and musicians from the classical and electronic world.

Amitai-Lavi's work is straddling on the boundary between twodimensional and threedimensional. It is characterized by love of craftsmanship, sensitivity to details and an exploration of unusual materials. In her recent works Tal Amitai-Lavi shows images that mark out elusive spaces of emptiness and fullness.

Through a variety of methods and different materials she creates worlds whose foundations are fragile and disintegrating. These worlds seemingly materialize from concrete images yet they create a disturbing mental atmosphere. Her unique work succeed to transcends the private case and addresses universal values with which any viewer may identify.

To me, creating comes from an inner need like the hunger. It s a wild feeling and it need to be responded immediately. One can’t learn how to become creative unless s/he feels that need. Then s/he will find his/her way to make it.

No need to pass through Academic education although the professional network of art (nowadays) requires it. Recently I read a phrase from Oscar Wild that makes sense to me: « Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time t time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught».

Concerning my Persian roots and my background in theatre, I should say that both are permanently present in my thoughts as well as in my works. But to be more precise, to me my Persian roots does not mean anything except Persian Poetry which is a real treasure.

In my work I try to share my life with the viewer as if they were my close friend, as if we are companions to great discoveries. From loneliness, to love, to boredom to friendship. I connect to radical feminism art theories that suggest – the personal is political. Trying to intertwine daily feminine life - prosaic moments and distressed moments. My main attractions is exploring body limitation in a spiritual manner. Tring to connect to elements outside myself – people, plants, moods. The inner body and the outer world try to be symbiotic.

Spending time out in the world has greater value to me than spending days on days in the Atelier. Hoping to meet new people and experiences that will inspire me.

Capturing moments and reenacting them through painting and video. My presence in the work is rather constant. From intimate moments with nature to private lonely moments at home.

Because life in Israel is an existential reality where choices about what to look at and what to ignore are made almost on a daily basis, creating art therefore cannot be devoid of a certain subjective political gaze even when excluded from the artworks. The need to merge the aesthetic with the politic and to connect myself to a specific reality of ‘time and place’ was a slow process that started during and developed after my undergraduate studies, while I dwelt upon the meaning of being an artist. Very early on, working with the concept of ‘earth’ (‫ )המדא‬involved confronting the dialectic of ‘the’ land whether it be ‘The Holy’ or ‘The Mother’ Land.

I am interested in the

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blurry area the inbetween, the space that holds the tension of the real and imagined, the outside and inside, the natural and man-made.

It is in the blurry-area that I explore, seeking to make sense of the world. Through material investigations, repetitive processes, and precarious placement, I build installations and sculptures reminiscent of a landscape, yet somewhere between the real and perceived. Most recently, I have drawn inspiration from the American backyard, a pseudo natural space manicured to fit the boundaries of home, yet outside the private domestic space. The homeowner defines this public space this is the in verses out.

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Mehdi Farajpour lives and works in Paris, France

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Sapir Kesem Leary lives and works in Bern, Switzerland

Tal Amitai-Lavi

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lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Claire Williams

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lives and works in Brussel, Belgium

Milana Yalir

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lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Max Epstein StĂŠfy McKnight

Claire Williams

Max Epstein

Canada

Belgium

Israel

My interdisciplinary and experimental work looks at the ways Northeastern Ontario landowners protect and secure their land and property through preemptive and deterrence mechanisms, such as traditional and contemporary surveillance. The mechanisms instituted by Northeastern Ontario municipalities and landowners are influenced by urban centers, characteristics of land, technology, sustainability, psychology, physicality and (in) visibility. My practice looks at the ways that artist productions and cultural objects translate and disseminate information and cultural theory. Most specifically, it examines surveillance mechanisms used by rural landowners to protect their private property, livestock and neighbours.

Working at the borders of science, technology, arts and textiles, Claire Williams sees her self as an artist and researcher that tries to work between these fields, finding a common language, creating and amplifying specific interactions between different mediums. Her obsessions lay mostly around data, sound and ancient textiles, trying to materialise digital matter, imperceptible or inaudible informations found in our super saturated techno environment. She likes to work with unstable media, researching ways to create specific tools, usages or techniques to give us a sensitive experience of our daily environment. In her work she mainly uses textile techniques, hacked machines, DIY electronics, open source software and hardware.

Image comes from thought; thought form learning and experience; the soul from weighing and evaluating; the authored message from the integrity of soul and the values that it encourages. Dialogue in art first exists in the arena of human experience and perception. Second, is the studio. An object maker is author of content and simultaneously fabricator of physical form aligned with the narrative space carrying the implied communication. The dialogue is finalized in the reception and interpretation of the audience, giving the object of art meaning.

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lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

StĂŠfy McKnight

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lives and works in Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Ariane Littman

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lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

Julia Six

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lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA On the cover

, a work by

Special thanks to Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman, Krzysztof Kaczmar, Joshua White, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Sandra Hunter, MyLoan Dinh, John Moran, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Michael Nelson, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman, Krzysztof Kaczmar and Robyn Ellenbogen.

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Mehdi Farajpour Lives and works in Paris, France Lives and works in Paris, France

YET UNTILTED It s an experimental & cutting

edge performance using body, video and some accessories to create a landscape by shadows on a white screen which is set up at background. The performance is easily adaptable to various locations such as Art galleries, museums, public spaces as well as any type of stage. More info: http://mehdifarajpour.com/yet-untitled/

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Performers: ,

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Mehdi Farajpour

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LandEscape meets

Mehdi Farajpour An interview by and

, curator , curator

Hello and thanks for your interest in my work. Actually, when I think about the beginning of my career an artist, I remember that I have been always fascinated by multifaceted artists in the history of Art. Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, … To me, discovering a theatre play written by a poets who has been also a drawer/painter was/is not only provoking my curiosity but was/is also a joy-able effort to understand and try to perceive a huge competence that one artist can develop during years by practicing different forms and disciplines. I love Coctau’s works not as a fan but because he was the one who thought me how not to be afraid of modern classifications, labels, boxes and frames that others (art network) are imposing on an artist. It is hard to walk on borders. People (spatially program managers and curators) are not keen of multifaceted artists. They need to be able to categorise you and your work. During years of working as a non-categorazable artist, I heard very often from the program managers that they do not know how to present my works. They need to to put you in a box with a table such as dance artist, theatre maker, visual artist,… They even try to to create a new category nowadays labeled

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Mehdi Farajpour

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Interdisciplinary artist that does not make any sense since it is still not precise.

I studied drama (precisely to become an actor) but after few years of doing as an actor in the city theatre of Tehran, I gave up because I was not satisfied since I was not able to totally express myself in that discipline. So I switched my career to become a theatre director and then a choreographer. But besides all, originally, I consider myself as a poet. I have to admit that I started writing poems even before I decide to study theatre in the university. I was in high school by that time. When I entered into the university of fine arts (department of Drama), my vision on things has become wider. Theatre had offered me a new language (as a new tool) in which I could talk and act at the same time.

Although, with the poetry, I did not have that Acting tool. I do not want to say that the poetry is a passive language compare to the theatre but I can carefully say that theatre is more comprehensive form of art and more open towards togetherness than the poetry. This is not a critic against the Poetry. It is only what I feel about it. The poetry is a personal cure to me. I can hide in my room and live with it although living with theatre needs going out of your room, meeting people,‌ During the years at Fine arts university, I spent a lot of time with the artists of other disciplines such as Cinema, Painting, Sculpture, Music,‌. I should admit that I learnt more things by spending time in the courtyard of the university than sitting in the classrooms and listening to the professors. (I believe there is a profound problem with classical teaching methods).

In the courtyard of my university, I noticed that each artistic disciplines is a language with its own capacities, competences and

2016, performed at Sala HIROSHIMA of Barcelo

possibilities. Some ideas, concepts or emotions can be better expressed in one than the others. This is because of the particularity of that language (discipline).

It is because that particular language is offering you a wider space or a certain

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na

possibility that is able to easily host your concept inside itself. But of course, to speak in that particular language (or to expresse your concept in a that discipline), you need to know how basic rules (grammar) of that language works.

This was the point when I did break up with those common classifications in the university and went towards a more open area without even knowing that it is called interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary art.

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Mehdi Farajpour

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2016, performed at Sala HIROSHIMA of Barcelona

To me, creating comes from an inner need like the hunger. It s a wild feeling and it need to be responded immediately.

One can’t learn how to become creative unless s/he feels that need. Then s/he will find his/her way to make it. No need to

pass through Academic education although the professional network of art (nowadays) requires it. Recently I read a phrase from Oscar Wild that makes sense to me: ÂŤ Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to

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thoughts as well as in my works. But to be more precise, to me my Persian roots does not mean anything except Persian Poetry which is a real treasure. I am not able to avoid or to ignore the poetry in my works. I grew up with it. The poetry is everywhere in Iran, in the streets, in people’s daily conversation, on the walls of cafes, behind tracks, on top of gates,…I would even say that all Persian traditional art forms (music, calligraphy, miniature painting, carpet art,… are either inspired or directly connected to the poetry. Shortly, it is part of me and it is a part that I like the most and I would love to conserve. Simply because I can’t imagine a life without poetry. Without poetry life is unliveable, clumsy and ugly.

Concerning my theatre background: It is also part of me but not in the form that I studied in the university. I created my own theatre form through dance and movement.

The same way that I created my own dance style through theatre.

What is important to me about theatre is its dramatic aspect, the dramatic moments. I try to create those dramatic moments in my choreographies. When I work on a theatre play (that does not happen very often), I try to dance the words, the text. Like the one I did called BECKETT (premiered in 2008 in South Korea). In that show, I danced the « situation » in which the character of play is living (Krapp). I did not play the character itself. The show was too physical although I did not move a lot of the stage. I was on a chair for 40 minutes our of 45 minutes of the show. remember from time t time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught ».

Concerning my Persian roots and my background in theatre, I should say that both are permanently present in my

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Mehdi Farajpour

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Improvisation is the territory of Performers (actors, dancers, musicians) and it gives them a freedom to exist in a show (performance). It lets them to be part of the creation process not only a moving object on the stage for the sake of choreographer or director. I like to offer my performers (including myself) the freedom of living in the moment although I have to admit that I believe only in conditional improvisation not a wild improvisation. By saying « conditional improvisation » I mean a « structured sort of improvisation ». To work on this, when I work with a group of dancers, first of all I explain the situation (dramatic moment) to them, then I clarify the type of movement I would need to see.

At the end, I explain to them « what I do not want to see ». This very last remark can take a lot of time because here is the moment when I start trimming my dancer’s movement. After these three steps, the conclusion (basically improvisation), does not look like an improvisation anymore and maybe only me (as the choreographer) and my dancer will know about it. The audience may think that it was not an improvisation.

About the Chance in my approach: Yes, I have to confess that it has a special place in my works. I even try to predict or open a space for it to happen during creation process as well as during the final performance. Chance is present in my

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Mehdi Farajpour

Mehdi Farajpour

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works in two different forms: Good Mistakes and Miraculous random.

About Mistakes: I am a choreographer who is not afraid of mistakes. My dancers (performers) know it by heart since I continuously repeat during the rehearsals that: « I love mistakes ». When they hear this, their first reaction is to laugh although they know that I really mean it. Mistakes happen by chance and the only thing that you as an artist need to do is how to use them. Mistake is a miracle itself if perfectly done. The worse is a badly made mistake that means an unfinished or betrayed mistake. A mistake has to be developed perfectly not to be given up by the artist. I only do not like betrayed mistakes.

About Miraculous random: I work very often on what I call « Random choreography » that means creating an atmosphere for the audience where they can see an illusion of logical connection (choreography) among dancers/performers although there is nothing more than the CHANCE (and of course in clear structure). This is coming from an aspect of mine as a Performance artist who believes in NOW&HERE while performing. To me, an ideal dance show is the one that is changing from performance to performance (night by night) because it is called LIVE ART (arts vivants).

I just created a new performance called AFTER ALL putting all these concepts together (CHANCE, RANDOM, NOW&HERE, IMPROVISATION). It was performed only once (at Hiroshima theatre of Barcelona) and I know that if there will be a chance to re-perform it, it will become a different performance because of the abovementioned elements (words).

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As I mentioned earlier, Persian poetry is my main source of inspiration in most of my creations including shows, performances, videos and visual art works. YET UNTITLED, is also both visually and conceptually inspired by Persian poetry in general and by several Persian poets in particular (Omar Khayyam, Molavi, Hafiz,‌). I just tried to capture and mixe their views on the univers in a contemporary context. I also borrowed some of the major elements of their poems in YET UNTITLED. For example the music that is indeed a live sound captation of my own breathing rhythm while performing with a tiny microphone installed on my jacket. I transfer the sound of my breath to a computer and with the help of a software and sound mixing desk, I create a music in front of the audience (that is of course different each time that I perform). Or Clay is another word/element borrowed from Omar Khayyam who has very often used in is poems. For him, the clay is symbol of the earth as well as the human.

Another elements that I focused on in YET UNTITLED are: CURTAIN, SHADOWS, TREE BRANCHES and a GARMENT on which all those words/elements are written in a calligraphic manner. So it all about poetry since the concept itself is coming from

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Mehdi Farajpour

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there. I just used an up-dated language to speak about it.

About SHADOW - as the main element in YET UNTITLED - I have to add an explanation as follows. The Shadow has a powerful meaning in Persian poetry. It is the sign of existence because whatever exist has a shadow, otherwise it does not really exist (from materialistic point of view). At the same time, in Indian beliefs, shadow is considered as the illusion of reality. Our world is a Maya, meaning the shadow or the illusion of another world (which is the real world) and we can’t see it. This subject are all my inspiration sources to work with.

At the end, I would like to use this opportunity and point out a cultural difference that I discovered while creating and performing YET UNTITLED. It is again about the shadow (as a word and as an element) that as I mentioned before, has a symbolic meaning in Persian poetry which it is rather opposite to the western perception from the word. Shadow in majority of Persian poetry refers to the notion of Shelter although it does not refer to the same notion in western cultures. I assume it is because of the strength of sun in Iran that sometimes can be too sharp and even harsh, specially in the deserts. So, it is always considered as a resting point where one can relax and protect himself/herself from the burning sun. This notion does not make any sense in most of European countries where it does not happen to have a long period of sunny days in raw.

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Mehdi Farajpour

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This is a very important question because one of my interests in performing art’s world is about VIEWING. How to watch a performance matters to me. From which angle or which corner my audience are going to watch me also matters.

The very first concept of yet untitled (that was performed once in Toulouse in frame of a video art festival called Traversevidéo) was to set up the curtain in the middle of a room (gallery or museum). The performance was supposed to happen only in one side of the curtain. The other side of the curtain (that was also open for public) there was nothing except the shadow of performer and the elements (accessorises).

The aim was to make a live video art and share the process of creation with the audience. Later I adapted the performance YET UNTITLED to the new venues where there was no possibility of setting up the curtain in middle so I was obliged to use back-wall as a curtain that also worked for me.

I love performing in public spaces because there, it is me who is obliged to adapt myself to the environment/space.

Performing in the street or in a gallery is not (and should not be) the same as performing on the stage. Simply because when an artist decides to move out of a theatre n order to perform in the public space, means that he/she is looking for SOMETHING that could not ne found inside theatre or on the stage. That SOMETHING can be a direct dialogue with public, or a particular atmosphere, space, architecture,…That s why I could never understand the artists who are performing the same show in many different spaces

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such as galleries, theatres, museums, street, parks,…without any adaptation in the concept.

When I create a performance, first I imagine it in 3 dimensions. The floor has always an important role in my shows (performances) and it has to be seen. That is why I mostly prefer to set up my audience in a higher position (like in Greek theatres) where they can easily see the floor. For example in one of my recent shows called CORPS OUBLIÉS (the rite of spring), the choreography was made for/with the video that was being projected on the floor. The venue was a huge abandoned shipyard with a clumsy ground.

Or in another show called STOP SPOT, the whole stage including dancers were all covered with newspapers. Also in YET UNTITLED, the floor has got its own role. To me it represent a blank canvas on which I am painting with shadows.

Well, body and digital technology in my works are completing each. They are not jus put together side by side but they are put inside each other. I do not use technology to fascinate my audience with new sciences,…. I use it as a tool. For example in most of my performances I use video mapping but it always stays very basic. I use it as far as it supports my concept not more. It does not interest me to transform my show into a technological demonstration about a particular software or technology. For example in « ETC, ETC. » that technologically - is the most sophisticated show I have ever done, I still stayed very

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simple and basic. There I used two video projectors and one camera that was filming on line. One of the projectors was projecting the online film and the other projector was projecting the one-line drawing that was happening right there.

And dancers were being led by a drawing artist who was drawing in real time. The logic behind it was that ETC, ETC was about Antonin Artaud who was a drawer himself,… I never understood those artists (specially younger ones) who are scarifying their concept (intellectually) just because a certain technology has a technical capacity than what they actually need for their creation. In this case, what is happening is that the artist is adapting his/her concept to the the possibilities of a new technology instead of doing opposite.

I mean at the end the show/performance is becoming a demonstration for a certain software (light, video or sound,…).

The truth is that nowadays the technology is more mobil/active than the art. Art has become a follower for new technologies.

There are more initiations and new ideas among technology scientists than among artists. This is too obvious. The quality of technological productions is getting better and better although the quality of art (in general) is getting down to nothing special.

I may be considered as a pessimistic artist but this is how I feel. In Paris and in most prestigious museums and galleries, very often I feel so disappointed after visiting a

new exhibition,.. I think this is the result of a huge misunderstanding that started with Surrealism in general and Dadaism in particular. For example Duchamp and his brilliant revolutionary art work titled « Fountain » has become a model for so many bad copies. We do never think that it was a movement not a school. But unfortunately lack of artistic knowledge among most of curators for visual art and program managers for performing arts brought us to this point when I deeply doubt when I see a announce about contemporary art exhibition.

Anyway, to answer your question: I believe that in a very close future, ART will have nothing interesting to say in front of the evergrowing technology. We should start re-thinking about: WHAT IS ART. There must be an answer.

I wanted to speak about food problems through an artistic medium. I am so sensible about this subject specially when I see the huge amount of food wastes in socalled developed countries although we all

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know that in some others countries (few kilometres away) people are dying of hunger.

Anyway, I was sure that I am not going to make a performance around this concept because I have already seen a lot of performances with the same theme in which the artists themselves are wasting a lot of food, just to say this is happening in our world. To me this is a contradiction between what you say and what you do.

Recently, I saw a theatre piece in Paris that was directed by a well-known director where the actors were wasting hundreds of litres of honey per day (per performance) just to criticise food consumption in our societies but actually they do the same. That honey could save the life of at least hundred children in Africa, India,… Anyway, I decided to work with another medium and to use a natural element as food that is not eatable: The stone.

While working on this video, I remembered a phrase by Marcel Duchamp about his masterpiece called Fountain. He said that every object in the world is potentially an art piece only if the artist properly prepares the conditions of presentation for it. So, I did the same. putting an stone in a dish with a fork and a knife: Preparing the condition of presentation. « The situation is very,… » is also a good example for what I was trying to explain as my answer to your first question.

Actually, it was not I who decided to use video as a medium for this concept but it just happened. I would like to say that it was video (as a medium) that picked up this concept and it worked. In the beginning my idea was to work with photo but in the middle of set up, I felt that something was missing. And then I tried

video and it matched better to what I was trying to do (say). It even brought a new dimension to the work that was the Sound (the missing thing in photo).

I would say if an artist could be critical about himself/herself, s/he can make that synthesis happen that Peter Tabor has mentioned. Collaboration between two or more artists is a tricky subject. It can work when there is no intellectual concept behind the project but when it comes to an ideological or an intellectual concept, artistic collaborations can easily fail, simply because we are all different with different views and opinions about life, world, etc. To have a fruitful collaboration, there has to be always leading mind (general idea) other wise I consider it as entertainment not art. I never mix these two.

A clear example is: when I am inviting a video artist to collaborate with, I give them absolute freedom to develop their

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own ideas, concepts, skills. But if the conclusion of the collaboration (conceptually) becomes opposite (or too different) from what I wanted to create, I simply reject. I m not talking about EGO, I am talking about the leading mind that I mentioned before. And of course I will adapt my concepts to that leading mind if I am invited for a collaboration with other artists.

I started working on Meditative dance (or more precisely the EMPTY BODY method) almost 15 years ago when I was writing on my thesis in the university in Tehran. The title I choose for m thesis was MONK PERFORMERS that got published as a book few years later. In that book, I am talking about the power of PRESENCE on the stage and how an actor can obtain and develop it through meditation and yoga practices. Few year later, when I switched my career towards dance, I adapted those ideas from ACTING to DANCING. There EMPTY BODY (or Meditative Dance) method was born.

Teaching is one of my passions. Actually that was one of my motivations to start a program called PARIS SUMMER ACADEMY that is growing so fast. The idea was to let artists teach their personal approches instead of art teachers. Because I believe when an artist is teaching, what is happening in the workshop is an ARTISTIC EXCHANGE but when an art teacher is teaching it is only TRANSFERRING SKILLS. So my answer o your question about

getting inspiration from my students is YES. I should even say that I learn much much more from the participants of my workshops than what they learn from me.

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First of all, I believe that we (artists) should not forget that the audience matter because to me each performance is an encounter between the artist and the public. I like to be prepared for this meeting. One of the things that I do for this preparation is think about their place

(view) or the condition I would like to put them in. Depending on the concept and the performance, the condition vary. For example in my solo called BECKETT, I put my audience on top of a metal structure that was surrounding the stage from four sides. The were obliged to watch the show downwards. I was performing in the center of this structure. The reason was simple. It was because my show was based on « Krapp’s last tape » by Samuel Beckett and in the beginning of the play, it is written that the character of play is in a

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Mehdi Farajpour

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basement. Or in YET UNTITLED, they are free to move around the room while I am performing. I also like to challenge with their comfort and their patience. For example, in one of very recent works called AFTER ALL, I repeat the performance twice. So they actually wee the show twice while waiting for a point where I will change it but it never happens. Or in DO NOT ENTER, I leave the end of my choreography open and let for dancers to decide when to finish the performance. If a dancer decides to go on performing till 10 hours, I won’t stop it. Yes i like this kind of communication with my audience.

To answer this question, I would like to start with a poems by Serge Béhar. This poems helps me a lot to meet with my audience before my every performance :

ousting my life forcing it out of its hiding place.

For thou and I I have come out of myself small dot in suspension on the surface of the globe indifferent to the extinguished lights to the end of the embraces and of the spasms and of the orgasms

Besides, and more generally, I would love to focus more on a concept called INSTALLATION FOR DANCE, that I started to work on since few years ago. It is a sort of interactive and interdisciplinary project to bring dance & visual arts together. It is rather a large structure than a concept for one single performance. Actually the very first project in frame of this structure was a performance called DO NOT ENTER ! that I did once in Barcelona (March 2016) and I will re-work on it in Poland in couple of weeks.

I actor of my volitions I have come out of myself with my body under my arm to perform life without mask with my bare hands my feet bogged down in the earth my eyes riveted on my reams, I have spent my time

As a very first step after this interview, I will be performing YET UNTITLED in Krakow at Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor (CRICOTEKA). I am really looking forward for it because KANTOR was also one the multifaceted artists that I have always appreciated.

During the same period of time, I will be also teaching my workshops EMPTY BODY in a city in south Poland called Opole (that was Grotowski’s native city) where I will recreate a performance DO NOT ENTER!.

And at the end, I will continue with programming for PARIS SUMMER ACADEMY which has become a passion for me. It gives me an occasion to meet so many emerging artists as well as established ones and all in one place. Last year, I had the chance to invite JAN FABRE’s company to Paris to teach in frame of PSA 2016 and it was absolutely satisfying. For next year, I am still wondering which company/artist to bring in highlight.

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Sapir Kesem Leary Lives and works in Bern, Switzerland

I

n my work I try to share my life with the viewer as if they were my close friend, as if we are companions to great discoveries. From loneliness, to love, to boredom to friendship.

I connect to radical feminism art theories that suggest – the personal is political. Trying to intertwine daily feminine life prosaic moments and distressed moments.

My main attractions is exploring body limitation in a spiritual manner. Tring to connect to elements outside myself – people, plants, moods. The inner body and the outer world try to be symbiotic.

Spending time out in the world has greater value to me than spending days on days in the Atelier. Hoping to meet new people and experiences that will inspire me.

Capturing moments and reenacting them through painting and video. My presence in the work is rather constant. From intimate moments with nature to private lonely moments at home.

From video to painting, you will usually find my blonde [or wigged] presence in the work. I try and include the viewer as much as possible, to create a body which allows the audience to reflect themselves.

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LandEscape meets

Sapir Kesem Leary An interview by and

, curator , curator

Hello to LandEscape and its readers. My first introduction to art and art making was when I studied theatre. To be perfectly honest, growing up, I dreamed of becoming actress and studied acting while in elementary and high school.

Once I finished my compulsory military service, I have begun official training in a Theatre school. After two years I left the acting school in search of a new direction. I think that performing on stage was too emotionally demanding, and being the total person that I am, I immersed myself in the characters I played. By the time we were done with rehearsals I was emotionally and physically drained.

That experience made me realize the importance of the interconnection: I needed to eliminate the element of the director and connect more to my own character. Maybe that was the reason I started documenting myself in videos.

In my opinion, honesty is the most valued quality in an actor/actress which translates for me to honesty with oneself and a sense of freedom in front of the camera. I was lucky to find art as means of expression, it is another stage but the scenes write themselves - they are not directed and I try to be an honest spectator or an active participant in the story.

Christopher Reid

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My love for television, animation, comics and film is a core element in my cultural substratum. The ability to be so wrapped in a story in a way that make one feel a part of something outside of oneself. The connection one has with fictional characters can sometimes feel liberating and meaningful. I wanted to make that connection from the other side of the screen. Reach out to the viewer.

In my paintings and drawings stand as well my personal experience as a means to tell a story. In other words, I try to transcend my specific experience so that its core speaks of something bigger. I try to see the experience as it was, but naturally - memory can be tricky and some things get distorted. I love that. Our memory can make such profoundly more precise impact than a camera, because of the emotions it carries. I use photos and videos to jog my memory, but painting a realistic picture does not interest me. I prefer painting my own memory. As this is a main aspect of my painting aesthetics - to be able to transfer the feeling of the experience into a painting while trying to stay true to the natural surroundings of the experience.

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That actually depends on the medium I choose to work with. It’s a different set up for drawing, painting, sculpturing or video.

Although the first thing that needs to occur in any medium is paying attention

to something while it is happening. Since my work is mostly focused on my personal experience, I must first choose the experience. It doesn’t have to be an earth shattering understanding.

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Sometimes just noticing the lighting in a certain scene can feel meaningful enough to try and live it again through art.

I try to be attuned to the environment I’m present in. When I am having a

conversation with a friend and suddenly get the urgency to film it [in real time] -- it can become a very delicate situation. The friend I am conversing with must feel comfortable with the camera otherwise I

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the frame rather than on intimacy, everything is lost. The process of documentation everything is very delicate. Even when I film myself, if I do not approach it with an open and willing heart and just worry about the end product, the magic is gone.

will lose both the conversation and the documentation. In this scenario the best set up is a mental one. If my friend doesn’t feel comfortable with the camera then it is all gone. If I am too focused on

With painting it varies. Sometimes I paint scenes that I have already filmed, then I let the videos and photos run on the computer screen while I paint or I spread drawings on the table. The format is chosen by the shape of the memory.

Some memories are panoramic, some are zoomed in, etc. I take many brakes while painting, it’s hard to hold a feeling or a memory for a consecutive amount of time. Still, a painting can take between 2 hours and two weeks [usually not longer].

In painting, I feel exploration needs to always occur. When I lose curiosity and go to previously found solutions, it usually feels boring and not genuine. I find it hard to commit to a specific format or surface. Sometimes, a specific paper draws me in, sometimes it can be a block of wood I found. I collect surfaces and then when a shape of a memory fits a format I have, I get excited and eager to paint. In choosing colors, I also try to stay loyal to the scenario while connecting to the feeling of the experience. It is also important to hold both these ends while remaining playful. For instance, in „Missing the Gondola“ the mountains have many colors: brown, white, green that actually exist in the landscape. At the same time, the red, purple and blue of the mountains in the picture stand for the passion and emotion of fantasy I was experiencing from seeing the Alps for the first time. This painting actually has a funny story because I got stuck on top of mount Pilatus [after literally missing the

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Gondola down the mountain] with my newfound love and current partner. The whole painting is chaotic: the mountains look like gushing waves while my partner and I are colorless, immersed in each other. Even the blankets on the bed create two winged figures observing one another.

Phase to Face is an autobiographical video following my experience in a student exchange program in Switzerland. The first part of the video investigates the quiet space of being alone while flirting with a new persona. The second part, follows encounters between me, new friends and strangers, deepening the search of meaning in loneliness and love in a foreign country. I actually arrived to Switzerland heartbroken after finishing a relationship of eight years. It was my first time completely on my own. I have never travelled anywhere for more than two weeks and have been in a committed relationship since I was 19. So being alone was a new and exciting experience for me. The camera became my partner in the process of discovering Switzerland and my newfound independence. She [the camera] was the one I confided in. I took her everywhere and felt she was my confidant. Everything felt so new, that I

could be inspired even by the structure of a house. I was inspired even by the leafless, naked trees [not a common phenomenon in Israel]. I made one

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important decision: to never be lazy and always take the camera with me, and to never shy from asking the person in front of me if I can film him/her. I was editing

throughout the duration of my stay in Switzerland. It was interesting to discover myself and my friends in the edit process. When filming without a script,

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one gathers an enormous amount of material. I watched a lot and tried to carefully choose the scenes that fitted the mood I wanted to create. I searched

for specific moments of honesty and connection between the film and the viewer. If I had to make a list of inspirational sources it would be too long

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In order to answer this question I think I need first to define what „direct experience“ is. Direct experience is generally experience gained through immediate sense perception. I believe some people can get into a creative process from mind stimulation rather than the senses. Sometimes, an idea is so exciting and stimulating that it inspire us to create whether we had a personal and direct experience with it or not. For me personally, the direct experience is very important. If I am stimulated by a concept I will search a way to meet that concept in a more intimate way in order to enter the creative process. For instant, the video Tea Ceremony is a mixture between direct encounter with material and inspiration triggered by a book about Wabi Sabi*. I was never in a tea ceremony, and all my information about it came from movies or the Wabi Sabi book. The experience was not direct, but I tried to make it direct. I tried exploring that notion and make it personal. I wanted to gain that ceremony despite the fact that I did not have an opportunity to participate in a proper tea ceremony. to read. I think it’s about connection and intimacy. Once I am able to feel intimacy with a tree, human or even a wind breeze; there is potential for art.

Nonetheless, while collecting pieces of sand and glass on stormy days from the beach, I thought I felt that spark, which Wabi Sabi refers to. So maybe it was inspired by the direct experience after all… :) Thinking back on my classmates in

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Shenker, I cannot think of any work created that had nothing to do with the creator in one way or another. It is true that I do a direct documentation, but everyone in my class ended up interpreting their personal experience in one way or another. Some tried to clean the personal aspect once the process was on the go and some left it visible. * Wabi-sabi represents Japanese aesthetics and a Japanese world view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.

The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete"

Yes. Many times I feel that one medium is very limiting. Different media open options for many more ways of exploring a certain concept. The body and mind react different to each medium and being playful is a huge inspiration source.

Filming documentary can feel very direct.

This scene is interesting so I film it. Then in editing things change a bit to capture the atmosphere. Video is more than one shot. It is an event and the editing process can take a long time. With Phase to Face, the editing process took a few months.

The process of documenting is different from the editing and is different from the end product and each process adds another layer that transforms the original experience. So the end product is actually not direct at all, but is concreated through

different lenses, through bridges and valleys.

Painting is actually much more direct, there is an immediate reaction of the painting surface to the colors. The oil

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colors tell a different story from the camera. I have less control in painting. I try to create the image mostly from memory and as we know a memory distorts the situation. Nevertheless it

feels much more personal than a photo.

The painting can tell me something new about the video and vise versa.

It’s hard to explain how the different materials affect the mind process. When

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one thinks in 3D, in 2D or in media; each medium tells a story a bit different.

Above all I love to experiment and be surprised by the material.

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Many times one feels the history of the material and this can affect the mood of the work, especially if one is attune to it.

In the year 2001 there was a suicide terror attack in a nightclub located on the Dolphinarum beach in Tel-Aviv, it injured 120 people and killed 21, mostly teenagers. Today, this beach is neglected and is full of trash, glass, sand and leftovers from that night club. So as you can imagine, it carries a heavy load. I mixed all those materials together with plaster in order to create a tea set. I was interested in the contradiction between rubbish and destruction to a peaceful act of drinking tea and contemplating. Even while watching the video, I can feel how much the tea set creates an atmosphere that my colleague and I had to surrender to. It starts out playfully with the sound, which contradicts the serious expressions we have. The entire mood is about imperfection and failure, and that has an immense grace thanks to the tea set. I believe this kind of things could only happen when the material has a history and by pouring more meaning and feeling into it. I attempted to capture the Wabi Sabi sentiment in the work.

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The viewer is very important to me. The most important thing in my art is to make a connection with the viewer so that we can become allies. It is quite hard to imagine what each person would feel and how she would respond, so when I begin the process of editing—I try to remove the spectator from the equation and cater to my own aesthetic preferences. If I feel that I managed to create something that interest me or makes my stomach move in one way or another, I know I am on the right track. When I show works in progress to colleagues and friends I try to be very open to new descriptions of the work. It is very exciting to hear something I did not have in mind, sprout out in someone else’s mind. When a viewer is curious enough to create his own interpretation, then surly there is something interesting that is worth exploring in the work. I start by trying to challenge myself and the people I work with in my videos. Then, they challenge me back and a discussion is created. So, yes. It is very important for me to trigger the viewers’ perception. If I manage to do so, I feel accomplished.

I think we all have a relationship with nature. While working on New Form, I felt that connection in a more visible way. I grew up in a city and growing up, I didn’t spend much time in nature. The time I made New Form I was very interested in meditation. I have been practicing

meditation for a while, but at the time I created New Form I experienced a particular opening and a deeper curiosity and awareness to my surroundings. I

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realized how disconnected I was from nature. I found myself stopping on the side of the road to observe a random grass field, a random bird. In the city I

watched the sky in the middle of hectic traffic jam and went to the beach much more frequently. I think being attuned to Nature [by 'nature' I refer to any

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environment that is not industrial] we can deepen our connection to our own human nature, and to the way we observe ourselves and our surroundings. The nature

in my works reveals the mood and emotions that cannot be spoken. The most direct metaphor is probably the stormy sky that expresses and/ or stands for the

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nature in work convey is: Stop. Don’t rush forward. Let yourself be bored or amazed by what’s around you.

stormy mood. In painting, since there is no text, other visible signals are more needed than in video. The nature helps to go deeper in to the story. The main thing I feel the

In my work I usually deal with my own life but in my school it was often said that the mere act of creating art in Israel-- already makes our work political. My sister, Sharon Avital, who is a researcher in the humanities, recently wrote that even the decision to be joyful and going to musical and spiritual festivals (that are very popular in Israel)—has political implications. She claims that by choosing to participate in an alternative way of life, we choose by default to not succumb to the propaganda of fear and the politics of identities that divides Israel and actually the entire world. So it is easy to see that in Israel each decision we make as individuals and as artists has political overtones. But now I live in Switzerland and I think that it is not so different even if not as obvious: my decisions to consume meat, or use plastic, or create art rather than to work in another industry – all have wider implications. The challenges I face as a young woman in this world are shared by more people of my generation. As the feminists said: the personal is always

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political. So what I try to do in my own work is to explore what I am familiar with and allow the audience to feel the reverberations. To answer your question more directly, I am not sure that the role of the artist has changed over time or that it is a question of geography. I guess it also depends on the personality and the urgency of one’s call. As for new media, I think that what it allows us is to share and to share more quickly. Artists, intellectuals and travellers traditionally had the ability or took on the role of looking at their lives and cultures from a different perspective and articulate what they saw in their respective media.

Perhaps now with the increased movement and flow of information—more people can look at their lives and cultures with fresh eyes. I don’t think that it make our work as artists less relevant, but actually adds a new sensibility since we can develop a conversation more easily.

When I was fresh out of theatre school I started a video blog and got comments from all over the world. It was amazing and really inspired me.

Audience reception is very important to me. Nevertheless, I will not compromise

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on important matters just to be accessible. I feel that my videos can sometimes be difficult for some viewers, since they can be slow going. I like to linger on certain points, not rush to the next scene. I am not afraid

of boredom. My hope is that the audience can surrender to it. Or even feel the need to fight, but feel it and let it be. Each context demand different effort and different actions. Despite trying to challenge the

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audience, I also surrender back into the walk I want us to take together. If I feel I have gone too far with my demands, my decisions will change.

Regarding speaking language - When I was just working in Israel I didn’t give it much thought. Once arriving in Switzerland it became more urgent to be understood so the main language became English. The

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curious to make a work that intertwines all three languages. The deeper I go into German, the more I discover the differences between the languages. A different language has different expressions that create a different state of mind and shapes a different world view. In the past year I have been working on a new video about the one year my Swiss boyfriend [artist Andreas Jenny] and I had to keep in long distance. There is much more English Hebrew alteration and the subtitle making process made me realize how much a language affects the way we think and act. It also affect the mood of the film.

situations are not directed and must feel natural. For example, in a certain scene a friend from Israel came to visit. We spoke Hebrew and it felt much more personal.

Now I am learning German and I am

I am currently editing footage of a colleague [Artist Guy Aon]. He documented himself for a period of time and now I took over the materials in order to make a short video from it. It’s interesting to go into someone else’s world and try editing it. It is a very different process and experience than when I am editing myself. I am currently living in Switzerland and hope to travel a bit more. To continue documenting and also make an attempt to write a more scripted video. I’m working on another project about swimming pools [I have been working as a lifeguard for this past summer]. And, of course, always carry on with painting and drawing.

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Tal Amitai-Lavi Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

T

al Amitai-Lavi (born in Israel, 1969) is a multidisciplinary artist, engaging in painting, drawing, sculpting and installation work.

She graduated cum laude from the Hamidrsha- Faculty of Arts, Beit Berl College in 1994, and got her B.A. (cum laude) from the Multidisciplinary Program of the Arts, Tel Aviv University in 2001. She has an MFA in Creative Arts from the University of Haifa.

Amitai-Lavi had exhibited several solo shows among are "We are a Bound Family" (1996); "Aleph for Ohel [tent] / Bet for Bayit [house]" (Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2001); "(temporary) Happiness" (Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004) and "Light Construction" (Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2014).

Nowadays she is working on her next solo exhibition, which will take place in Basis Gallery, Herzliya, March-May, 2017.

She had participated in various group exhibitions in major galleries and museums in Israel, among them the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum; Haifa Museum; Petach-Tikva Museum; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. She has shown her

work in prominent venues abroad in Germany, New York, London etc.

Recently, she was selected to be a finalist in "Arte Laguna Prize", Arsenale, Venice.

Amitai-Lavi's work is straddling on the boundary between two-dimensional and three-dimensional. It is characterized by love of craftsmanship, sensitivity to details and an exploration of unusual materials.

In her recent works Tal Amitai-Lavi shows images that mark out elusive spaces of emptiness and fullness. Through a variety of methods and different materials such as sewing thread, soda powder, suction cups, nylon strings, plasticine etc., she creates worlds whose foundations are fragile and disintegrating. These worlds seemingly materialize from concrete images yet they create a disturbing mental atmosphere.

Her unique work succeed to transcends the private case and addresses universal values with which any viewer may identify.

Tal Amitai-Lavi is represented by Chelouche Gallery of Contemporary Art. Her works are in some of the finest collections in Israel and abroad.

Photography:

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LandEscape meets

Tal Amitai-Lavi An interview by and

, curator , curator

I have always been surrounded by art, culture and aesthetics both as an art consumer and

. Photography: Matan Katz

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, 2004, installation view, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Photography: Ady Shimony

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maker. I started my graduate studies at Hamidrasha - Faculty of Arts, where I have developed my multidisciplinary thinking through learning a wide range of techniques, mediums and thinking art in an abstract and complex manner. From my point of view, the Multidisciplinary Studies at Tel Aviv University were a direct result of my former studies at Hamidrasha. I was already working in the field as a young artist and had a thirst for knowledge and broadening my horizons.

The studies at Tel Aviv University enriched my cultural background with theoretical studies of theater, cinema, music, literature, philosophy and more.

My MA degree, at the Haifa University was mainly in order to further my professional career. I have no doubt that my formal education had a role in building my cultural and aesthetical foundation, despite being at times through rejection and contradiction.

Nevertheless, in my view, the practical work is paramount. In relation to this I identify, with the words of the American artist William Wegman: “Learn by doing.�

I see no substitute for the daily and persistent practice at the studio in order to build and refine my aesthetic language, and accredit it. The work at the studio forces me to ask questions, to conduct theoretical and practical investigation, to undergo a process, a kind of a long journey in which the artistic statement gets refined into an actual work.

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It seems that my multydisciplinary approach is the right way for me to express my ideas, and it is certainly what suited me so far. Until my studies at Hamidrasha I mainly painted. The exposure to different mediums in general and 3D mediums specifically enabled me to develop and broaden my lexicon and search for different methods. I think every work presents a riddle, invites new challenges, and therefor calls for different technical and media solutions. The main question, I believe, concerns the relationships of image/form, medium/technique and meaning/content.

An example for this quest after new methods can be seen these very days at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. My work ‘Direct Hit / The House on Nahalal st. Haifa’, that was made using black sewing thread is now integrated with video animation, which contributes to my artistic intention.

Moreover, I believe that the evolution of the history of art in general, and mine in particular, is based on tradition and innovation, conventions and their rejection.

Knowing what was done before me and sometimes alongside me, is what motivates me to explore new materials and means to express my ideas.

Tal Amitai-Lavi

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, 2013-2014, threads on Perspex, light (detail) Photography: Youval Hai

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, 2010-2011, soda powder, glue, color, 120 x 160 cm

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Consequently to the question regarding new methods, arises the question regarding to my use of unexpected materials for art. My materialistic search is undoubtedly a challenge and one of the characteristics of my artistic language. Every material has its own uniqueness, qualities, advantages, disadvantages and restrictions. At the studio my work is that of a chemist, alchemist, mathematician or engineer… searching for the exact formula and dosage. The choice of materials could come from a kind of vision, intuition that is inspired by the material itself, as is in the work with nylon threads, and at times it is a kind of puzzle that the artistic concept posits. The chemical reaction that occurred in the baking soda works, for example, was the result of a research after a material that would emulate snow or ice; it had to have qualities of elusiveness and fragility, reminiscent of a magical and deceptive childish world. At times, the material choice could be derived from funding restrictions which eventually evolves into an artistic concept. In a similar way to the work of my favorite American sculptor Tom Friedman, I too use every day banal, cheap materials and utilize them to create works with plastic appearance, which is appropriate to showcase in art venues.

Another interest in working with exceptional materials is the play on the accidental and intentional, between the controllable and the unpredictable. Sometimes I succeed in “taming” the substance and sometimes I give in. This play at the studio intrigues me and drives me forwards.

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It would be redundant to state that my personal, one of a kind, subjective experience is the very thing that makes me unique. And yet I feel that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience. My work stems from deep within my own roots- biography, life stories, memories and such. Therefore, even if I hadn’t experienced an event personally it could still resonate into my personal experience and become manifested in my works. This is the case in my works dealing with imagery of ruined houses, nature disasters, terror attacks, or war. (The series “Katrina” is based on hurricane Katrina, the works in “Japan 11.3.11” are based on the tsunami hit in Japan, my solo show “(temporary) Happiness” is based on the Versailles wedding hall disaster and others). Respectively, the demolished and ruined houses imagery echoes on childhood memories as the daughter of a general contractor. The landscape of my childhood was etched with the sites of bare casted concrete, shaky construction beams mounted on concrete ramps as stairs, staircases without banister, sand instead of floor, bare building frames and so on. These memories and experiences have sunk deep into the heart of my creation.

On a personal biographical level, the image of the ruined house reflects the actual dismantling of houses following my divorce on one hand, and later, the death of my parents on the other. From the local-political aspect, the ruined house is an expression of the Israeli reality, filled with insecurities and uncertainty, terror attacks and wars. On the global and international aspect, it is an expression of worldwide terrorism, world and terrifying natural disasters. Perhaps the connection between the personal and the collective experience creates depth in the works, while also allows a universal affinity with the viewers.

My sources for inspiration, as stated, are simultaneously the inner and exterior world. For a plastic artist the issue of representation is eminent. However, during my work at the studio which requires, amongst other thing, collecting, cataloging, research, classification and archiving, translation and interpretation, it becomes ever more conceptual and exceedingly abstracted. This process from representation to abstraction is a natural course for me and occurs by itself.

, 2012-2014 wood, nylon string, paint, light installation view, "Light Construction", Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv Photography: Youval Hai

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My art is based on symbolical strategies and probes psychological, narrative elements, which I have referred to previously, even if in an indirect way.

These elements exist in each one of my works. The narrative aspect is mostly used as a starting point, while the psychological element can be found in every work.

Nonetheless, I take special care and attention in the studio, so the work will not become illustrative or a therapeutic tool.

The ongoing process allows me to step away from such immediate aspects by defamiliarization, abstraction and other means that enrich the work and allow a verity of interpretations. In other words, my work is designed to invoke an intellectual, non-narrative response. My work aims to reject superficial didactic strategies and urges the viewers to reflect and project personal associations.

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, 2012-2014, wood, nylon string, paint, light, 207 x 80 x 45 cm (detail) Photography: Youval Hai

, threads on Perspex, light, 70 x 110 x 7 cm

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, 2004-2006, Wood, nylon string, paint, 38 x 128 x 33 (Tal Amitai-Lavi & Haimi Fenichel), Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem Photography: Naama Fenichel

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2013-2014, nylon string, plastic, paint, light, installation view, "Light Construction", Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photography: Yoval Hai

In my practice, as mentioned above, my point of view is autobiographical.

However, I strive to deviate from the personal event and to formulize universal principles with which the viewer can identify. Effectively, the viewers are an essential component of my work process.

I certainly take them into account

throughout my process, from the very early stages of production to the final translation into plastic art form. I imagine at my studio the ultimate viewer, one that could dwell and contemplate in front of my work. I consider the viewer’s body, his possible motion in the space, the ways in which his senses work and how I might manipulate him, in the positive sense of the word. I think of his emotional and psychological as well as

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, 2015-2016, acrylic on plaster (work in process, installation view). Photogra

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his social, cultural, intellectual and conceptual world. From my perspective, the moment where the viewer identifies with my work, the moment where my work can affect him and resonant on his own personal experiences, is a critical and cathartic moment.

From February till May 2017 I will show at "Basis Gallery", Israel, a new solo exhibition. I have been working on the exhibition “Green on the Outside Red on the Inside” for the past three years. The three main objects at the exhibition are: an extremely large landscape of European forest constructed from thousands of suction cups filled with paint, a floor sculpture made of tens of plaster cast deflated and painted watermelons, a kind of Israeli take-off on the Halloween pumpkin heads, and an additional landscape work made of hundreds of tree air fresheners which will infuse the gallery space with artificial fragrance. In addition, I patiently anticipate the realization of two large installations made with nylon threads, optic fibers and lighting, which are a continuation of my former exhibition ‘Light Construction’. I have yet to find the proper exhibition space that could accommodate these ambitious projects.

An interview by and

phy: Shachaf Dekel

, curator , curator

Claire Williams lives and works in

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Sound Embroidery

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LandEscape meets

Claire Williams An interview by and

, curator , curator

I started a few years ago to get involved in the D.I.Y, open source mouvement, mostly known in computer software and electronics. A totally new field of work and methodology was opening up to me especially coming from a textile background. I actually came to it when i was confronted to the 1980 domestic electronic knitting machines that were easily available but very limited in memory and size to knit out patterns, especially the ones i was working on which were not traditional patterns but very big images. So i was trying to find a cheap solution to this problem and discovered that other people where trying to find a way to hack these knitting machines to get them connected to a modern computer. Thankfully the documentation came along with an open source copyright and people were sharing their expertise and tests allowing anybody to reuse or modify them freely. I found the idea very interesting and it pushed me to create my own tools and share them. The challenge was not only to use or create electronic and digital tools under an open source copyright but also to try to apply this idea in my artwork and “physical� textile prototypes. This implied a new kind of methodology such

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Antennas

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Claire Williams

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as documentation to allow anybody interested to get access to the process of work.

At the same time i started working with electronic textiles, there was no training or classes existing in nearby schools so i had to find workshops to get, with help of Internet documentation, some physical teaching. This was actually the case of a lot of the patricians in the e-textile field so the only way to be able to learn was to share our own experiences and documentation.

This got me giving workshops with the hacked knitting machines and electronic textiles to beginners or more advanced practicans. I would say that my cultural substratum is as important as my super stratum as i tend to give the process and the construction of a project the same visibility as the finalized artwork, showing the skeletons and constructions of the project as well as the collaborative and contributions of others.

What interests me is the links of (pre)existing relationships that lay in the merge of science, technology, art, sound

and textiles. All of these domains have specific rules and come with opposite or different matter (virtual, invisible, tactile etc..) My multidisciplinary approach is necessary to be able to play around with the different constraints, grids and rules but also to be able to integrate them and use them in different ways from what they are initially meant for. Indeed, here the idea isn't to show a technical achievement but to reveal the poetic side of simple physical principals using familiar mediums such as textiles or creating electronics with accessible components.

The Antennas project was inspired by the Shipibo Conobo tribe living in the Amazon forest. They have a very marked style of embroidery patterns made with geometrical figures. The Shipibo women who simultaneously sing an Icaro chant will each embroider a pattern. Without having a model or looking at the neighbors design, they have the exact same pattern in result.

It seems that they have a way of encoding sound into their patterns that correspond to specific musical rules of the Shipibo culture. The Shaman then wears the embroidered textiles and follows the

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pattern composition and structure to sing a healing ritual. I found very inspiring the way the Shipibo can translate a sound and encode it into a pattern musical score but also how a textile could become a sort of gate, translating invisible data. I saw these embroidery patterns like some sort of antennas that could receive and transmit a signal by their pattern and structure.

Here the antennas are made using traditional textile techniques. Their different shapes using knitting or weaving techniques create for each model a specific type of antenna. These antennas can capture the electromagnetic activity of a space. You have to imagine that a lot of different waves that are part of the electromagnetic spectrum are crossing us everywhere at any moment for example wifi, radio etc.. waves are constantly sending signals. They are otherwise invisible and inaudible to the human ear. In the Antennas project i created textile antennas that could receive very low frequency's (50 Hz) which is the type of waves that emanate mainly from electricity, motors, neon tubes etc... or even the earth natural magnetosphere. You can even also sometimes pick up a local Am radio station passing by... So all this dense sound scape is suddenly audible to the spectator, making the textile Antennas a sort of filter of this surrounding data. A custom electronic amplifier translates the signal the antenna receives and transforms it into an audible sound, proposing an immersive sound experience to the public. The electronic principals used in these Antennas are very low tech, inspired by 1920's radio communication where very few electronic elements were needed to receive a radio signal. A lot of my projects are inspired by ancient, tribal textile artefact's and very early electronics discoveries. They both have something very magical in their

Antennas

stories or in their inventions and were made with very simple tools. Although today we have very complex technologies surrounding us, i still find it amazing an inspiring how these ancient technologies

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were invented or discovered at the time.

It is also much more easy to reproduce using elements“things found in your kitchen“.

→ my blog link https://xxxclairewilliamsxxx.wordpress.c om/ for more lecture on my research studies.

Antennas

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idea of what we are doing: looking for ghosts, aliens or mysterious magic magnetic energy's and forces...etc. The sounds we can hear throughout the antennas or the strange equipment shows all the collective imagination of people and creates vivid discussions where people from the street participate to the project. In this case we can see that the public sphere naturally mixes with the art sphere creating some kind of social sculpture.

One exhibition i did with An Electromagnetic Walk was taking place in a window that was on a busy street. Here people were invited to borrow the Antennas and have a walk with them on the street. What is interesting with An Electromagnetic Walk is the idea that the spectator becomes a mobile antenna. He becomes his own chief and can explore the electromagnetic activity of the street creating his own composition and experience going from a private to a public space. The street becomes a vast field of exploration creating an improvised itinerary carried by the wearers curiosity, being lead by different electromagnetic sources. The second layer to the project is that, being a mobile antenna gets the spectator to be in a somewhat odd position trying sometimes to reach out to difficult areas driven by the will to see which source certain electromagnetic frequency's create a curious sound. When you are out in the street waving your strange objects around you do look like if you were searching for some kind of mysterious energy for the people outside.

The interaction lies between the people who are carrying the antennas with the people in the street as they very often come and ask what we are doing. Sometimes without any explanation, or without listening, they surprisingly have already a very defined

The borders between different disciplines tend indeed to get more and more blurry. We can also add to that the border between minor and major art, crafts and technology are blending more with one another.

Technology is for sure everywhere in our life so it is becoming more of a recurrent subject in arts questioning our intimate and public relationship we have with it. But we can also observe how digital and electronic tools are getting more and more accessible or tailored for artists who don't necessary have a scientific background. Indeed it is much cheaper today to build a sensor for example and much easier to integrate code to build a specific software for an interactive installation. Adding to that the makers

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movement has been also amplified by the growing access to Internet to learn by yourself or exchange on how to use these tools. I would guess that in a mere future it will be more and more common to have technology integrated in art works as a tool or medium being at the same place as photography, sound or video for example.

Data Knits is a continual serie of research where i try to store data in a textile surface.

Since i use digital tools and translations to generate and visualize data, mostly through the use of patterns, i am always confronted to the notion of scale. Indeed, scaling digital bytes of information back into a textile means that on one hand you have a huge amount of information to process as you can easily render pictures and patterns with a computer. On the other hand i have semi industrial ways of producing my Data Knits using my hacked knitting machine which means a very low resolution of information compared with today's storage capability's.

An insignificant portion of content can be materialized into threads. For example my knitting machine has 200 pixels of maximum width and the hight is “infinite�. Translating and getting interesting textile results is time demanding so i can't materialize and memorize every sort of data i want to either.

This forces me to think of what specific information i want to archive through a

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An electromagnetic walk

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https://we.tl/LRtkZLDlWU

Claire Williams

Claire Williams

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textile medium. For example i recorded the electromagnetic activity of specific locations, each knit has coordinates indicating the precise place where the electromagnetic sound was recorded. In general each knit corresponds to 3 or 4 min of sound which is also totally insignificant to the electromagnetic activity of the place.

Materializing such information into a sort of archaeological artefact's reminds us of what we want to leave behind or save.

What we want to memorize or lose from our world and our personal trace of our time living on it. Today masses of information and data are created and transit, through optical cables, frequencies stored in data centers, hard drives etc‌ a huge amount becomes invisible and the different encryptions used in digital files to create and store the information are hidden far away in the different layers of encodings. In Data Knits, it is precisely this invisible data that i decide to store and save from the masses of information. At the moment it is made it becomes a sort of archaeological artefact's, similar to a vinyl disk, where we can at any time decide to decode it and re-read the sound taken at a precise moment in a precise place.

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Traces of data can be found everywhere in nature, a skin cell with your A.D.N, the age of a log of wood in his rings, the traces of wind on sand etc..of course natures way to embed memory is infinity more precise and subtle in comparison to man made devices that stock an infinitely small portion of artificial data in comparison. In An Electromagnetic Walk I try to give the spectators an experience of their amplified environment, filtering and making palpable or audible on part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is otherwise inaudible to us. Each frequency contains all sorts of data, the most recognizable is for example a radio frequency. As an artist i try to give the spectator a sensitive experience of our world by working on things that are familiar to us, collected from an everyday environment yet they have different layers that can each be treated, interpreted and looked at in very different ways. Here i choose to investigate the inaudible and invisible layers of our environment by using very material objects to get a sample. We can decipher these frequency's using electronics which will filter and amplify these waves so that as humans we can hear a portion of them but in An Electromagnetic Walk their is also an important part that is also fictionalized by the participant, using the natural human capacity of creating how own reality and interpretation. As an artist i recall to scientific tools used to probe man made environments but i am also interested on how we can also use the natures data to create specific tools after it. For example i started experiencing with antennas that can receive VLF, also described as the earth natural radio.

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https://we.tl/LRtkZLDlWU

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Data Knits

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Claire Williams

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Indeed these electromagnetic waves are naturally made by the earths activity You can hear storms that are 1000 km away, aurora borealis etc.. that are described as spherics, whistlers, tweaks, crackles sounds. It is always an amazing moment when you hear the activity of the earth, sources that can come from very distant places on earth.

These antennas can only be used in remote areas where their is no electronic interferences. Using these constraints changes a lot of aspects of the project giving it a new perspective. It also requires that the spectators will have to be more attentive and less consumerist as we entirely dependent on what sounds the earth will or not make asking for patience and giving a place for silence.

Indeed a medium and it's construction can be a way of exploring our realities. For example the antennas are made by knitting fine copper wire in a certain way that i can reproduce the physical principals of a classic antenna. Here the textile medium in it's construction and material transforms the object into a functioning system: the antenna will intercept a wave and transform it into an electrical signal. This signal is then amplified by an electronic circuit and translated as is

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into a sound. Here each intricate knit, tension and shape of the final object will determine what the antenna will receive.

Every antenna is unique because of it's shape and medium and give us different results. When i was experimenting with these different parameters i also made choices in order to construct a certain sound scape and how the antennas would amplify our relationship to reality. Even using scientific tools, it is always a certain perception or translation of reality that we create either for artists or scientific. But at the end of my experiments, it was on the contrary more the type of electromagnetic frequencies and electronic disturbances that i had encountered that actually created and influenced the very specific shapes that were created for the antennas.

No i don't think it is indispensable, i also believe that being just an observer, exterior to a direct experience is also an important place to have in a creative process. I think that we should always experiment with these different scenographys because it can also open a new path to an artistic project.

50°36’35.7″N 3°23’34.3″E

The audience reception is very important but even when sometimes my approach

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can seem a bit obscure to a large public, I think that it still leaves a space for imagination and personal interpretation.

The mix of a familiar mediums and languages such as textiles with electronics

and computers makes it also maybe more accessible and mysterious to the audience. Their is also just a fun part when wearing the antennas like playing a game with people you don't know. But as i

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50°36’35.7″N 3°23’34.3″E

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mentioned before being an observer is also a role you can take and it will give again a different experience, their is no specific rules.

The different reactions are of course all precious and reused in future projects as an important contribution. I also transmit my artistic experiments through workshops. Even if it can seem distant to the actual installation it is for me very linked and helps, inspires me also when we create things “hands on� with the participants. I have had mixed participants, from 75 to 16 years old, learning sometimes for the 1st time how to solder a circuit or to crochet a yarn. Their is also a gender issue when you are in digital/electronic arts field which is mainly male dominated so it is important for me to have a broad public and to test different ways of transmissions giving extra keys to perceive an art work or to understand better the world we are living in.

The Antennas are evolving (and getting bigger !) to be able to receive data from satellites for example. Their will be an exhibition in Nantes, France this summer with the Antennas project too. Otherwise we are working with a sound artist on a generative installation on the relation between patterns and scores, we are currently looking for a residency to develop the project. I still regularly give workshops, i also hope to get more time to document more on my blog and share other inspiring projects.

An interview by and

, curator , curator

M ilana Yalir M

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LandEscape meets

Milana Yalir An interview by and

, curator , curator

My introduction to Visual Arts and Dance was at a young age and that was after I've been a gymnast engaged with an intensive training program. I think the energy of flying in the air and having to trust my physical instincts always stayed as the base to the drive I had ever since. The research of

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Milana Yalir

Milana Yalir

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Milana Yalir

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Relationships between Visual Arts and Dance was formatted in the Thesis I wrote with that title and that was what lead me eventually to the exploration of dance on video. I have to say that especially with my experience on the Rietveld Academy I was stimulated to film myself dance, my vision was to edit those registrations in order to design the space with projections of dance. In the piece I created Gallery of Dance which was a one hour solo show with panels moving on wheels and on the panels appeared collages of self portraits partly photographed and partly painted in black and white mixed media, this piece was the beginning of a journey towards installation. My background was universal and rather Cosmo political so in this respect my art was dis attached to my Hebrew roots, it felt like an open horizon to relate to time and space regardless a specific place. The aesthetic element comes in my work from a classical approach based on the academic studies I had for composition, colour, texture and dynamics but the question what do I want to say with it is the first initiative for its creation.

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Milana Yalir

Milana Yalir

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The roles of chance and improvisation play a major part in my approach and take part in my set up right from the beginning of the process of a production. It developed from my request for new motivations in the research of dance. Personally for me it came from the inspiration to interact with different spaces of architecture and nature. I wanted to leave the studio and become one with the composition of the location I choose. I liked to play a role in front and behind the camera at the same time. In this way I could explore the moment with movement which is true to this moment and comes from an inner impulse. While doing that I would constantly look at the film created and make my decision for the next composition. A good example for chance meetings are shown in the installation Street Dancing. As I was dancing on different locations in the small village Kremniza in the Slovak Republic, on one of the locations

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behind me dancing on the path and as I wasn't even aware of it, the Gardner of the place run into the composition of the frame of my camera, jumped into a split then jumped back to his feet and run out of the frame. When I saw it on the film I edit it in a loop, so that this action will continue forever and this was played simultaneously on the two side screens of the installation while in the middle screen I edit my dance on several other locations in that village. As I open the situation for chance, all kind of things that I could have never plan in advance happen.

My sources of inspiration were first of all the place where the film was shot,

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Milana Yalir

Milana Yalir

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a beautiful village in the Netherlands called Vreeland meaning Free Land. I walked everyday to the same path wanted to capture the leafs on the water. The slow movement fascinated me it seemed like meditation while the colours and light kept changing. My second inspiration was the text of the poem

by Linda Hogan, the context of her words: "Walking I'm listening to a deeper way, suddenly all my ancestors are behind me, be still they say, watch and listen, you are the result of the love of thousands."

The words of the poem came in the sound editing of my voice and influenced the text I wrote further for this piece which were intuitively inspired by the visuals. The metaphor was created while I edited the sound and image together. The leafs laid out behind each other seemed to me like all these generations Linda was talking about in the poem, therefore they represent the fragility of life. I conceive the metaphors within the process of the work, the content is growing into the matter by the cross over between sound and image.

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I think that there is a constant flow between the imagined and the real since my concepts come from elements that I find intriguing to explore. Whether it is a visual element or an intellectual, a character I want to convey or an image. There is a dialogue created between the realm and the expansion of the idea once it takes a form and becomes alive.

Movement eventually is abstract and so is the composition in my paintings. There is a strong connection to an inner energy which is influenced by the external movement of the body, this is a meeting point between the real and the imagined, the exchange is rather associative in most works. It comes from the belief that the soul is the highest element in the human structure and the most intriguing and complicated to

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Milana Yalir

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understand as well as to manifest.

With that said I try to be true to my feelings and research the subcontinent of the body. It's like a land floating in an ocean of memories, impressions and emotions. The body acknowledgement brings to a better understanding of the spirit of the mind and heart. As I strongly believe in instincts, movement and motion are coming from a deep feeling and energy which are true to the moment and keep changing.

There is a vibrant communication between the body and the space around it, in that respect weather it's an architectural environment or that of nature the connection is created by a greater force like a sublime relationship.

Each work of mine takes a different approach towards Art role in public

space and creating public sphere whether in doors or out doors, location, gallery, museum or theatre. In the piece Other Half I experimented with the public questions and experiences from daily life actions that everyone can relate to in their own personal way.

Related to gender, identity, femininity and other topics the piece challenged the viewer with intimacy and provoked their imagination with self love and ego.

Other Half took a few shapes and has been shifted from a theatre installation where the public was confronted with those issues. Later on the piece was edited for an exhibition in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. There it took a conceptual form of the feminine identity through rituals in the Jewish culture, behind the editing of the work I tried to enter and touch the source of my inspiration from childhood by the festivities of Purim, which result in Carnaval time when people put on costumes and disguise themselves into their fantasy figures. So I edited my self changing image in a rapid repetitive patterns. I keep changing the nature of the pieces in this way on different locations it creates a different public sphere and brings another message.

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The relation between body and music for me is ever changing.

Especially since I started to edit body movement on video I could endlessly experiment with the relation to sound. A major part in the concept of my work with music is to film dance with a specific choice of music but when I edit the work and keep changing it, I set every time another music and sound. In that way I work with chance meetings as well, the piece is edited with music and then I change it to another sound and when it seems just as if it was designed together on the first place, I see it as the 'hand of God' something which is beyond planning and beyond the human thought.

That is the mystic part in my work and it goes further into my dance improvisation where I specifically ignore the music and research the dissonance between body and music. The more I open this relationship to an unexpected connections the more interesting it becomes through the progress of the work as well as in the result.

Improvisation takes many shapes in the process of my work. In my paintings I throw the paint directly from the tube as it creates lines and shapes I relate to that and start to build the composition carefully, with that it is most expressionist and brings out my inner feeling. My dance methodology is based on improvisation from the beginning of the process to the end. While improvising I chose several physical elements which I repeat later on.

The choreography is designed with patterns in the space but that would allow later on the freedom to improvise the movements when the public is there as well. The only part which is set in the installation is the video editing. To demonstrate this idea I could say that with my commission from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts for the Tropenmuseum which resulted in the piece It Takes Two To Tango. I asked to film myself dance in the space of the conference halls of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. As I was all alone I set the camera on a tripod in a low

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angle shot and filmed 5 hours of dance improvisation. The composition was set to play the space with mirror reverse imagery so that on the final installation which was 14 meter long with 8 screens and a mirror opposite, this particular fragment will transform into the shape of a cathedral. Out of 5 hours I choose 2 minutes which were edited for the installation. I related to the shape of the space but the dance movements is pure improvisation.

I definitely think the role of the artist has changed with the globalisation of the world. The means of communication are there to bring people, artists and viewers

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Milana Yalir

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together. In my personal preconceived way of looking at art it works well towards the universal approach I was always striving for. At the end 80 percent of communications are non verbal but of body language. Art is there to create a greater understanding to communicate universal messages which will create a bridge between people from different places and make the world a better place. I would like to take this platform and send a most important message against animals abuse, the suffering of animals is unbearable, for example the killing of dogs and cats in China, but of course all the rest of the animals that are being killed around the world that's shameful for the human kind. I hope with messages of artists and more people to communities around the world will make this problem grow less and less.

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Milana Yalir

Milana Yalir

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The energy created between artists working together and collaborating is most inspiring. My work demonstrates collaboration with photographers and camera men as Marcel Bode in Other Half. Since the movement is based on improvisation the movement of Marcel is playing along with mine, there is synergy and intense feeling created between two people which an individual can't create on his own. The space is designed with a large mirror of 5 meter long and two projections screens in diagonals of 6 meter each. The reflection of Marcel appears in the mirror at times and his shadow appears on the projection screens. In several editing I made I took in account to bring another atmosphere and feeling.

Another collaboration was with the dancer Megumi Eda in the pieces I created From the Soul and Rhythm of Chance. This beautiful dancer with the excellent classical technique was a great inspiration especially when I was behind the camera filming her dance with a long tale wedding dress. I set the rules of improvisation according to the pattern of the floor and took top shot view to expand the movement of Megumi in relation to the pattern beneath her. Other inspiring meetings for example with the composer Ben Witkins (known as Juno Reactor) who invited me to edit my visuals with his music. I created many experiments of video editing with several pieces of him as well as after meeting the composer Roni Porat and found his compositions very intriguing and compelling to edit the visuals I create with. As an addition I studied web design and worked in a game developer company. It was most inspiring to experience 3D design of very talented artists as well as the possibilities created with motion capture.

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my choice for a language took in consideration their background. It was very touching and amazing to experience their impressions from the performance and the talk afterwards.

The language I choose for a particular context has to do on the first place with what I would like to communicate. As my messages deal with identity, with personal struggles and the shortness of life, abuse of animals and abuse of people. In the last year I gave a performance at the Church of the Salvation Army in Amsterdam in front of women that have been abused. The core of my performance wanted to give them the power and inspiration to gain the energy within themselves and to find ways to step away from their past and focus on the present and future. There was a vibrant conversation after the performance and in this respect the nature of my art cross points with the women and

In my future projects for 2017 I have an invitation from a gallery in Amsterdam to exhibit my new works selected from drawings of self portraits. In this drawings I reached for minimalism after researching to express a moment in as little means as possible. Further there will be in the exhibition prints of film stills of self portraits from different times of my life to express the time flow and film stills taken out of video of self portraits as well. The subject of self portrait had been a cross line in my works since I started to create art and now evolved to my main focus.

Further my plan is to design dance installations for public spaces.

An interview by and

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Max Epstein Lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

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he nature of my activity is rather hard to determine, especially when one takes part in the space of Jerusalem for so long. Jerusalem cannot fully determine itself. Indeterminacy enables a certain freedom in the choice of medium and incompleteness. Multi-media obliges one to obtain a few visual languages and the ability to cross from one to another. When one of the mediums exhausts itself, you switch to the other and rest this way.

For several years now, I do not leave the house without a camera, having said that, it so happens that for months on end it remains in my bag. For me, Photography is a function of fixating a state of mind-mental photography.

Therefore, I photograph only when I feel an acute necessity to remember.

Lately, I draw more than ever.

Photography is enough for a temporary fragment, but not for a space. Drawing gives enough time not only to fixate an image but to reside within a space, to identify a certain connection with previous experiences. It also allows you

to put aside the psychoanalysis of memory and to clear space for work.

"Land of the Jackal" is part of a long term project - " Jerusalem Perspectives". where the structure and the meaning of the landscape plays the main role for both inspiration and the method. The exposition built from seria of black and white landscapes taken on borders of Jerusalem from both sides, the desert and the mountains. They all are snapshots which where taken when the real local jackals where physically crossing my way. After those moments, I was definitely searching for it's existence as part of the landscape, while taken the photographs. The question always was: "whose land it really is, it's or mine?". I made this experience a model for the exposition and put the real size jackal's sculpture across the way of the audience. So the question came up in the exhibition space. And the visitors became partners of the experience.

, 2014 oil painting on glass, light, shadow

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LandEscape meets

Max Epstein An interview by and

, curator , curator

My Bezalel studies began in a very young age. I was 18. By then, I have been living in Israel for slightly more than 1.5 years, dreadfully nostalgic about Russia. This state would not allow to penetrate the Israel reality and stood in the way of my studies. I resisted, could never completely accept the Bezalel school of that time, conceptualist as it was. My MFA studies followed in 12 years after graduation from Bezalel, when I already had some exhibition experience, and, essentially, a much more attentive and whole understanding of the ambience I have found myself in. The nostalgia, which previously constituted a very

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, 2016 Jerusalem Golem Wiretapping, ceramic sculpture and found objects

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Max Epstein

Max Epstein

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installation view, 2009

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Max Epstein

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, detail 1,ceramic sculpture and found objects, 2016

Max Epstein

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strong emotion interfering in the process, has become a largely efficient tool in my work. The way of thinking through Russian language, flashback memories from the Soviet childhood, literariness - all that has become a medium to work with.

All my production is construed upon the interaction with a place which accommodates myself in the given moment. Since most of my time is now spent in Jerusalem, it, in a sense, has become a schoolbook for appropriation of artistic languages.

Jerusalem is like a patchwork of

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numerous stories, characters, linguistic and cultural traditions. My major in Bezalel was ceramics and sculpture.

The archaism of ceramics embodies archeology and historical contexts.

Because of that, ceramic sculpture is often present in my installations (my favorite media till now, by the way).

However, archeology is by no means all that Jerusalem is today. In order to obtain the “freedom of movement” between narratives, from one patch to another, I considered necessary to learn several other languages. All of them have a correspondence and function within the Jerusalem cityscape: photography is the nonfictional\documentary, the memorizing (secularity and religiousness), drawing and animation is temporality, live-streaming.

Temporal parameter has a very monumental presence in Jerusalem.

Finally, sculpture and installation allow for accentuation and active interaction with the space, its interpretation…

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, digital print on photo paper, 2009

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, detail, fired ceramic sculpture, 2009

Max Epstein

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The Land of the Jackal is a project which by itself is a metaphor about belonging to the landscape. It was first in the “Jerusalem Perspective” concept. It is a synthesis of snap-shot photography and ceramic sculpture.

Namely, Jerusalem Perspectives is a method of in-depth observation and transportation around the city. The method implies a very simple thought: that which indeed catches your attention is not under your nose, but somewhere over there, in the background, on the adjacent hill.

What attracts you is misty and undefined, one is bound to conjecture and fantasize. In order to get there, one needs time. By that time, the reality obtains better definition, in becomes clearer, - and much less attractive. So you lose your motivation. Then you again watch the misty hills, and find another plot for yourself… Such transportation simultaneously involves both memory and imagination. That is to say, my understanding of the city is founded on the real events, but also on metaphors which developed themselves in the process. By now, I already have a considerable collection of such images of the photographed metaphors. As a matter of course, Jerusalem perspectives are directly related to the city outlay. Jerusalem is situated on seven hills, filled with labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys which would suddenly open into a vista towards a nearby hill.

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Jackal is “the local resident”. All the photographs from the Land of the Jackal series were made at the moment when my path was crossed by a live jackal. All of the images are the extreme long shots made on the borders of the city, around its perimeter. Watching through the distance, after the encounter with the animal, unwillingly rises the question: what if he is not there anymore? Does this landscape still belong to him? This experience constitutes the base of the installation in which in the space where the photographs are exhibited is “traversed” by a ceramic jackal in real scale. While making its sculpture, I relied not just on sketches, but also on textures and plastics of the photographed landscapes. In a sense, my jackal is made of them…

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, installation view, ceramic sculptures, 2014

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, installation detail 2, ceramic sculptures, 2014

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As I have already said, the place which I work with is not just a stage for action, it is also a schoolbook. Shapes, colors, sounds of the place may define the strategy of all the process. For example, in the installation Intervention, I tell the story of an acquaintance with Haula and her nurslings.

Haula lives in central Jerusalem, for many years, she has been feeding street cats in the yard of the Agripas 12 Gallery, and nearby. She has more than 50 of them, and other residents of the Nachlaot neighborhood, together with the artists and visitors of the gallery, are fighting a battle against them – for sanitation, silence, and so on. Intervention is a collection of sculptured portraits of street cats that broke into the gallery premises, that is, into a space where they are forbidden.

For the whole month of the exhibition they kept it off “the gunpoint within”, and the visitor would become a participant in a drama in three acts: (1) Cats Outside, (2) Cats within the Gallery, and (3) Cats Outside again.

Act Three possibly questions the spectators’ stance to what the “cats’ territory” actually is. It is important to mention that the sculptures did not attempt to match the color and plastics of the chosen prototypes, but

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rather conveyed the general palette of the yard’s dust and that of the Jerusalem stone. (ill. Intervention) Another work, also site specific, was made in the same gallery two years later: the Jerusalem Synesthesia. It uses the construction of the gallery, as well as its outlay.

Agripas 12 Gallery is situated at one of the busiest pedestrian streets of the city, where the whole gamma\spectrum of the sounds of Jerusalem can be heard. The gallery window directly faces the street, I used it in order to introduce the street sounds into the gallery space. For this end, I have built a ceramic soundsculpture, the “acoustic window”, which collects, filters, and amplifies certain sounds out of the street noise.

Recently, I pretty often employ the tactics of “site-conditioned” in my work with a place. Especially if it is a public place. In such situations, the choice of a place is crucial. There are several important aspects: first, the social functions of the place,

definitely. However, the perceptual qualities of the place are important not less, or even more. The place should have a potential for sensory interaction: to awake the memories, imagination, to contain an intrigue. In such interaction, I have deep trust to what the space can suggest. Here, readiness for improvisation is very important.

For example, one of such interventions was assembled in Hansen, a Jerusalem Art and Media Center, previously the leprosarium which functioned till the early 90th of the previous century.

The building was constructed in the middle of 19th century, and reminds a labyrinth, where the rout of movement is very strictly defined. Any change of the route strongly influences the total perception of the place. My work there was titled Barricade. It blocked two main corridors of the Hansen House, forcing the visitor to make a detour, or return.

The usual circulation was obstructed.

The idea itself was given by the Hansen’s storehouse, where I discovered the old hospital beds and dismantled ward doors. They stood there in a way that naturally reminded a barricade, a checkpoint. What remained to do was just finding the right, ‘critical’ point for the installation, and reassemble it.

, 2014 ceramic sculpture, acrylic on canvas, photography

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, 2016,ceramics, wood, sound

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That stage of work when the piece is already assembled and exhibited often turns out to be just a continuation of a process.

The point is that projects, despite the feeling of being finished, in my perception are only stages of a larger process. I see the ultimate goal in possible concentration and refinement of a method for interaction with space, which itself gets transformed in this process. In this case, the viewer constitutes a very important part of this interaction, a kind of indicator, and the exhibition, just one of the stages in this series of transformations.

Some of my installations are exhibited several times, with introduction of necessary adjustments, with some elements possibly added or reduced. Generally speaking, assembling the installation in a given space sometimes provides the only way to check its capacity and legitimacy. The deficiencies and faults are indispensable, and absolutely necessary, too, for the further adjustments. In such case, I endue the spectator with the role of

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interpreter and tester simultaneously. In fact, any new unexpected, novel interpretation may lead to a more precise following exhibition of the same work, or to an idea for the entirely new one.

Exhibiting always becomes a kind of socio-anthropological research. For example, I remember an episode of communication with a visitor at my exhibition Borsht. Borsht was a project juxtaposing Jerusalem scape with my childhood memories. Among other things, the exhibition presented a series of black and white photos taken in the streets of Pskov, a small provincial town where I was born and lived till the age of 16. It seemed that in context of Jerusalem’s provinciality they can provide a certain connection.

So, the episode in discussion involved an aged visitor who was born in the south of France, and spent his childhood years there. In my Pskov, he recognized his hometown and engagingly told me of his own childhood. At the moment, I clearly realized that the dialog became possible much due to the fact that both of us found ourselves to be parts of the Jerusalem space, bearing kin immigrant experience.

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, 2012, detail, digital print on celuloud, natural light

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, fired ceramics, wool, 2010

Max Epstein

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The space itself is able to prompt not only the topic of the upcoming “talk”, but also to guide through the choice of the working material and media. In this case, choice of the artistic language is always conditioned by the task which I pick up. The spectator has the right to decide whether he is ready to engage in the talk, or not. Shadow Mapping was an experiment in a totally fascinating “communication” with another Jerusalem artist, a painter Anna Tiho, with her understanding of Plein Air in Jerusalem. The installation was specially crafted for the space of the house – that of Anna’s former residence, presently a museum. A kind of contemplation about the people who used to visit her house before me, and about the merciless real estate development which takes place right around the museum. All of my visual language was construed on the grounds of studying Anna’s drawings, who in her own right had the chance to learn in Vienna with such masters as Schille and

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Kokoschka. Thus, the dialogue involved quite a broad circle of artists.

“Visiting Anna Ticho” stood as a working title of this project for a pretty long time.

The technique I chose [this time] was oil painting on glass. It was a fragment of the view seen from one of the house windows, broken into four planes: the window sill with a flower pot (such pot is often found in Anna’s drawings); a part of the garden; the construction site immediately following behind the garden wall; and, finally, the figures of the construction workers.

All the four glass panels were situated in the living room and penetrated by the light of a lantern situated in such manner that the opposite wall obtained projection of the shadows from the panels, composing them into a single image. The visitors walked between the panels, which were almost transparent, getting in the way of the beam of light from time to time.

Thus, for a moment they would also become a part of the image on the opposite wall.

My nearest plans include total installation Dacha in the Bat Yam Museum. The exhibition shall become

a part of the long term project Kids Want Communism, authored by the museum’s curator, Joshua Simon.

Dacha is supposed to assemble the research project of mine - “Russian speaking mythology of Jerusalem”. In many respects, this work resonates with the Borsht. I am going to repeat and verify some of its elements, checking them in the new space.

Then I have in store the residence in the Empty House Art Center, a marvelous colonial building in the very center of Jerusalem. So far, I have no faintest idea what is going to come out of it, I only can say that the house is fascinating. Generally, my distant plans include residences abroad. I would like to check my method of the Jerusalem Perspectives out of the current city and beyond Israel, in other contexts and with other materials.

An interview by and

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, 2015, mixed media

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S téfy McKnight Lives and works in Kingston, Ontario, Canada

M

y interdisciplinary and experimental work looks at the ways Northeastern Ontario landowners protect and secure their land and property through preemptive and deterrence mechanisms, such as traditional and contemporary surveillance. The mechanisms instituted by Northeastern Ontario municipalities and landowners are influenced by urban centers, characteristics of land, technology, sustainability, psychology, physicality and (in) visibility.

My practice looks at the ways that artist productions and cultural objects translate and disseminate information and cultural theory.

Most specifically, it examines surveillance mechanisms used by rural landowners to protect their private property, livestock and neighbours. By using hunting cameras and drones, my projects such as INFRARED and …does it make a sound? visually depict the types of surveillance technologies used by rural landowners, while also allowing audiences the opportunity to critique and engage with these technologies.

This project is multidisciplinary because it incorporates a series of themes that are best explored using specific and unique mediums.

Using experimental photography, drones and hunting cameras, I am able to critically examine surveillance practices in areas that are often mythically believed to be “too” forested or remote for technological intervention. This

project defeats the myth that going back to nature is possible, and that escaping surveillance and technology is obtainable.

Bio – Stéfy McKnight Stéfy McKnight is a Kingston Ontario based artist. She began her career as a visual artist while undergoing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. She completed a Master’s in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in 2016, and is now pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s as well. Interested in how cultural objects and productions produce knowledge and interaction, her research focuses on gender performativity, privacy, media, surveillance post 9/11 and Edward Snowden revelations.

Stéfy’s primary artistic medium is installation art in forms of site specific, video; experimental photography, performance and found objects.

Stéfy has recently exhibited work at the Centre for Indigenous Research Creation (Kingston, ON), Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre (Kingston, ON), Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning (Kingston, ON), OCAD University (Toronto, ON), WKP Kennedy Gallery (North Bay, ON) and White Water Gallery (North Bay, ON) and the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts (Kingston, ON). In 2015 her work Coded, I Am was shortlisted for the Queen’s University Research Photo Contest.

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LandEscape meets

Stéfy McKnight An interview by and

, curator , curator

First, let me thank you and LandEscape: Now! for this lovely opportunity to speak about my work. It is my pleasure to dig into it with you and your readers.

Born and raised in close proximity to Sudbury Ontario, I have always seen Northern Ontario as home, including North Bay. My parents wanted me to stay close to home and I wasn’t prepared to travel far on my own at the time, so Nipissing University seemed like the appropriate choice. While I really enjoyed my experience there, I felt like my practice didn’t evolve until my fourth year of my Bachelor of Fine Arts. The classes I took really focused on traditional mediums such as drawing, painting and printing, and media and installation weren’t a requirement or a medium of exploration. In my fourth year I was fortunate

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Stéfy McKnight

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to work with a very supportive supervisor who taught me the importance of using visual and cultural objects as methods of analyzing theoretical concepts. That is when most of my work began to grow into what you are experiencing throughout this text. My most successful work happened after I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and began my Master’s in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, where I had the opportunity and freedom to produce the work I felt comfortable with. Now again, pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s is also inspiring my artistic practice in new and innovative ways.

The landscape and culture of Northern Ontario has greatly impacted most of my recent projects. ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE was created in Markstay Ontario, which is located in the center of both Sudbury and North Bay. This body of work is a direct representation of the ways this landscape has shaped my practice. I have done many works that include found objects from this town, such as my series Tomboy Tools that was shown in North Bay, part of my BFA studio thesis in 2014. Northern Ontario is always impacting and shaping my practice in some way because of my personal and familiar relationship with the place.

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This is a fantastic question. My mediums and approaches shift with each new idea.

I call my practice rhyzomatic because I never know what medium, technology or installation technique I will work with next. Focusing heavily in the field of surveillance, I feel the constant need to keep updated with the new types of technologies used by institutions, citizens, police and the government to monitors and track subjects. I am a firm believer - and I will probably say it more than once - that artist have the divine power to use surveillance technologies to critique their uses and understand their function in hopes of crafting resistive techniques. In 2014 I created my first experimental drone video titled fuck. It was an experimental process that allowed me to understand the capabilities of a drone, its consumerist potentiality, creative capabilities and its overall function. The video turned out terribly because I had no idea how to fly a drone at the time, however it left me with a lot of questions.

Moreover, in 2016 I created my first series of works using a hunting camera, INFRARED. Using hunting cameras as a mode of surveilling trespassers and nonhuman animals are still new ideas hardly contested by surveillance theorists. It’s much easier to understand the technology and its sophistication if you

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can visually see the ways it documents land and you understand its function.

I’ve also experimented with qr codes and the ways they allow viewers to receive information through mobile devices. My 2015 Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning in Kingston Ontario exhibition Hawk Eye View had a series of works with qr codes – when you scanned the code, you had access to the Google maps image of CSIS or NSA site, which are some of the largest surveillance institutions in North America. The relationship between performance, art and information is one I think should be further explored by artists.

It brings another dimension into the gallery – one which we are familiar with in our public and private lives.

…does it make a sound? is intentionally a private video piece. The video was shot deep in the forest, on a piece of my father’s land. This video was shot amongst a field of trees, brush and small bushels of

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grass – completely disconnected from civilization (mythically speaking) and human animal presence. I felt completely alone.

The beauty of owning private land is that it is that – private. Once the video was shot, it was directly imported to an urban place for editing and circulation. I would argue here that I brought a highly privatized performance to a very public place, once it was uploaded online and presented during the 2016 installment of Dionysus: a Celebration of Defiance, a performance organized by the Chipped Off Collective based in Kingston Ontario.

The function of the video changed because it allowed audiences from a highly publicized space to interact with a private performance that was created away from human and public interactions. I realize there is some contradictory statements here, since myself being in that space made it more public, hence the title of the piece if a tree falls down in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?.

There is a play on word here that not only speaks to the fact that a human disrupted a normally quiet and uncontested space, it also speaks to the performance aspect as well. I wasn’t only in the space – I performed in it. The video was uploaded online to allow audiences the opportunity to view the space, since they would never have access without trespassing or permission from my family.

On the other hand, I brought a very public – technological practice to the forest by using a hunting camera as a method of documenting the performance. In my research I’ve found that rural landowners in Markstay use

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Stéfy McKnight

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hunting cameras to document their land and surveil trespassers. However, this idea of surveilling with hidden cameras is a highly urban and public practice, inspired by CCTV, dash cams, and police cams. This work was a double edge sword, where it invited the audience to see a highly privatized place from a distance, while also bringing a public practice to a very privatized space.

ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE came from my interests in how surveillance permeates our everyday life in both public and private spheres.

I was initially looking at the Snowden Files released in 2013 and how the NSA and CSIS were retrieving citizens’ data online or by CCTV cameras, mobile apps and GPS. However, once I completed my series Hawk Eye View in 2015, I began questioning how individuals use surveillance for their own needs – thinking beyond metadata, datamining, state surveillance and dataveillance. I noticed that sociologists were distracted by these new findings, spending a considerable amount of time, money and energy writing about the influence of these findings on North America. I thought of this as an opportunity to think of surveillance as a culture rather than an institutional practice. Specifically looking at how citizens are using surveillance technologies to protect their land and property.

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In 2015 I interviewed a series of landowners in Markstay Ontario and took photographs of their property as referenced in FIELDWORK. I found that hunting cameras such as those you see in Hunter and stopmotion were being used as CCTV cameras to document their property and protect their land from nonhuman and human animal trespassers.

This is when I realized that there is such

thing as a surveillance culture and that it is not only the government watching citizens as mechanisms of power and control, however individuals were using these processes for their own protection and security.

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In ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE, nature was the primary motivator of analysis and aesthetic. During the beginning stages of this project, I was interested in an article written by Kevin Haggerty & Daniel Trottier titled “Surveillance and⁄of Nature:

Monitoring Beyond the Human” published in 2013. The main argument of this article is that going back to nature to escape technology and surveillance is a myth, and that citizens would be unnerved to know the multiple types of surveillance technologies permeating what we call “nature”. This article really spoke to me because it brought together my thoughts about surveillance culture,

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technology and its relationship to landscape and nature, which is often seen as a Canadian place for refuge.

INFRARED is an example of this. I spent two weeks capturing stop motion photographs with a hunting camera, of landscapes in Markstay.

It was fascinating to see how the landscape changed over time and

throughout the day/week. The hunting camera was very sophisticated - it allowed me to see the temperature of the space, time and had night vision. This allowed me to experience the landscape and its constant changing form.

One minute the landscape was vacant with only water or trees, next there was an otter swimming across the frame.

It was a very exciting process.

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I like to think of my works as producers or translators of knowledge.

They are heavily influenced by current socio, political and theoretical discrepancies such as gender

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performativity, social justice, surveillance and its implications on citizens.

Cultural productions and objects create new ways of thinking about contemporary and historical themes in society, and it is through objects that we can think through these issues in critical ways.

The more I read, research or think about a socio or political issue, the more inspired I

feel to create work. Also, there is something exciting about producing cultural objects that can make audiences and viewers think or critique the current state of society.

I’m very interested in providing audiences with the tools to question and critique my work, and their engagement with socio, political and cultural problems.

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We are definitely in a period of time where traditions and contemporariness are competing in terms of reclaiming value and power. That being said, when are we never? What was interesting about ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE is it demonstrated that rural landowners were

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in a period of change – where their deterrence methods were changing to surveillance based processes. Though, they were still in a process of flux. What I mean by this is, where traditionally landowners would use private property signs or gates as a primary way of deterring trespassers, now recognizing the sophistication of CCTV, are implementing hunting cameras to help do this work. However, in these areas, it is impossible to abandon all traditional mediums because it is not sustainable to set up a dozen of hunting cameras if you own hundreds of acres of land. Therefore I found that rural landowners were living in a state of flux, where they were finding ways of creatively protecting their property, though still recognizing that traditions are necessary for survival (for now…).

This can relate heavily to contemporary art. There are many traditions that have yet to be distinguished, such as the crisis of the museum, and the power and canonical issues still permeating art institutions.

These are all routed in very historical and traditional mindsets, and we are still using these ideologies to form our current contemporary state of art, because they ensure power and value. Paradoxically there are many ways artists, curators and cultural producers have been trying to defeat these ideas.

Such as curating online exhibitions, pop up shows, works in empty storefronts, these creative ways of showing art are not only a testament to the lack of affordable and accessible exhibition space in North America, though speak to the ways space and place can help critique institutional ideas of what should be in a gallery or museum, and how artists and curators

think of new ways of showing work that is much more accessible to both artists and audiences. Respectively, the findings in ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE can speak to the relationship between tradition and contemporariness if we look at institutions of art in this way.

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Do I think the role of the artist has changed – no. Do I think the subject matter of art changes with socio, political and cultural systems – yes. New media hasn’t changed the role of the artist, it has given the artist new mediums and ways to critically explore and resist political systems. With

political ideas constantly shifting, and technology and media in constant development, subject matter and productions will consistently change. Hawk Eye View was one way I did this. I demonstrated a very heavy socio and political issue, about privacy, data retrieval

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same time understand and critique the technology by trying the medium out for themselves in the gallery space.

Here, the role of the artist didn’t change. I was still using art as a method of translating and providing my audiences with knowledge through new means. While these issues were very specific to North America – and these issues would have changed depending on geography – I still had a responsibility as an artist that has been part of the role for years: to provide audiences with knowledge, information and new ways of thinking through cultural objects.

processes and technology, through installations and new media techniques that speak to these issues such as qr codes. What this did was allowed me to provide my audiences with new ways of thinking about these issues and at the

Definitely - audience interaction and reception are the cornerstone of the production. When working in mediums that translate or produce knowledge for audiences, it is imperative to think about the ways audiences can interact and critique the work, and learn or unlearn from it. All of the works mentioned in this text are products of information and socio, political and theoretical concepts. Therefore, they hope to

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produce familiar or affective relationships with whoever interacts or engages with them. I often incorporate some sort of audience performance element to my work, which may include audiences scanning information from qr codes, or being surveilled through a camera in the gallery space. This allows the audience the opportunity to think beyond the works and objects, and become producers of affect and knowledge themselves.

In terms of language, I strive to use technologies or performative qualities that are familiar with the audience in which I anticipate interacting with. Qr codes, cameras, cellular phones are all contemporary technologies that most of my audiences are familiar with. It’s important that they are able to interact with the work in the confines of the space and feel as though the work is accessible to them.

I’ve been thinking about art and information more broadly and how research creation produces knowledge through unique means. I’ve been thinking about curating a couple of exhibitions of artists’ work that translates knowledge across disciplines (ie: surveillance, political science, health sciences, geography, computer sciences etc). I’m very interested in how artist translate knowledge through artistic practices.

Moreover, for my personal practice, I have an exciting project in the works. It looks at how Bill C-51 in Canada impacts artists

and cultural producers, in terms of freedom of expression. This will take many forms over the next four years, such as a series of exhibitions, artworks that may reflect many of the works in this piece, banner making workshops with Canadian activists and performances. Some of the ideas I have circulating in my head are

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more video works using drones and CCTV cameras and a qr project that allows audiences the opportunity to see how the bill infringes their rights.

interested and if so, I encourage them to contact me via my website.

An interview by

Thank you again for featuring my work – It is a great pleasure. I hope your readers are

and

, curator , curator

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A riane Littman Lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

Because life in Israel is an existential reality where choices about what to look at and what to ignore are made almost on a daily basis, creating art therefore cannot be devoid of a certain subjective political gaze even when excluded from the artworks.

The need to merge the aesthetic with the politic and to connect myself to a specific reality of ‘time and place’ was a slow process that started during and developed after my undergraduate studies, while I dwelt upon the meaning of being an artist. Very early on, working with the concept of ‘earth’ involved confronting the dialectic of ‘the’ land whether it be ‘The Holy’ or ‘The Mother’ Land.

A family memorial forest turned into a military censored area confronted me with national myths and personal matters and was transfigured into ‘Nature Morte,’ a pink greenhouse with real earth, gravel and plants. Following this seminal installation at the Bograshov Gallery in 1992, the meaning of the ‘Land’ in my work evolved towards an enhanced ironic commodification of Holy Land artifacts, an erasure of cartographic power in ‘White Land,’ and a gendered highlighting of the womb/tomb Mother Land.

In the midst of the Second Intifada I could not avoid the conflict, present in my daily life, to transpire in my art as well. In order to make sense of an existence in the shadow of terror attacks and to better comprehend the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I became a freelance news photographer. Back in the studio, the ‘Border Land’ artworks recounted my encounters with checkpoints, borders, walls and violence.

After the Second Lebanon War (2006) and the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead Dec-Jan 2008-9) I gave up this direct encounter with the field, performing instead a metaphorical healing of visible and less visible wounds. I had come to realize the intrinsic power of deconstruction as an alternative way to escape and overcome the recurrent reality of violence whilst allowing for a different reconstruction. The very deconstruction of power embodied in the maps brought forth a different cartography of imaginary maps, fictionally healed with Plaster and bandages.

Sewing the Wounded Land Maps of Jerusalem in various locations, not merely allow for the deconstruction of the green checkpoints on the original closure maps, but it revives the silent protest of mythical feminine acts of weaving an alternative fate.

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, Performance at the Sciences Museum, Photo: Oded Antman

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LandEscape meets

Ariane Littman An interview by and

, curator , curator

Hello Ariane and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background.

You have a solid formal training and after your studies in Social Sciences, you earned your M.F.A in Fine Arts, that you received from the prestigious the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. You later nurtured your education with a M.A in Art and Aesthetics from the Faculty of Humanities, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: how do these experience influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to the aesthetic problem in general?

First of all let me thank you for inviting me, I am honored to introduce my art praxis to your readers through this interview.

Regarding your question about my formal education: I believe that my studies at the Hebrew University and the Bezalel Art Academy, nurtured my artwork in ways that suited by personal artistic journey. Whilst studying for my BA at the Hebrew University in Social Sciences (International Relations) and Humanities (The History of the Middle East), I acquired an understanding of the world in general and of the Middle East in particular which broadened my perspectives

and many years later this would also influence the direction my art would take.

Yet though it was fascinating, I was longing to paint and create. Since a young age I drew, paint and wrote, my first vivid memory was, aged 4, running through what seemed then the never-ending galleries of The Louvre. At the age of 25, realizing that life was short following my brother’s tragic death, I decided to pursue my passion despite its precariousness. Accepted at the Bezalel Academy I started anew, learning everything about contemporary art. Creating was exhilarating but I felt a need to grasp the wider context of the art discourse and the role of the artist in society, most probably a consequence of my years of studies at University. I always felt that students in Art Academy lacked the intellectual discipline of thorough research while art history students didn’t fully comprehend the mystery of creating. Never entirely satisfied, I looked for ways through my studies to fill that gap.

As soon as I graduated from Bezalel, while already exhibiting in a well-known art gallery in Tel Aviv, I got a job at the Israel Museum as assistant curator in the Department of Contemporary International Art. This gave me an important insight into the politics of art institutions. Simultaneously while working and creating, I took courses at the Hebrew University in view of an MFA at Bezalel followed later by an MA in aesthetics at the Hebrew University. These years of studies

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2013, Performance at the Lifta Spring Photo: Yair Triker

Ariane Littman

Ariane Littman

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together with the creative process in the studio helped me find my own language as well as position myself as a women artist living and working in this part of the world.

You are a versatile artist and your approach encapsulates a wide variety of media, ranging from Performances and Video to Installations and Photography, revealing an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints.

The results convey together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://arianelittman.com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

I believe that the word itself “versatile” meaning: variable/inconstant has a negative connotation to it, but I think otherwise and indeed my approach to art is fluid. I see art itself as a kind of ping-pong between the outside world and the inner world resulting in a fascinating subjective alchemy. Art is a multifaceted way of seeing the world. Sometime you can see it (better) through writing, sometime through painting and sculpting, sometime through dancing or performing, or though the medium of photography and film making. Each medium offers a different way of relating to the world.

As a young girl brought up in Switzerland, art was the classical paintings and sculptures I saw in European museums together with poetry, dance and music. Later in art school I discovered contemporary art and marveled over Minimalism, Land Art and Happenings. If I had entered art Academy as a painter aficionado, in my second-year I had already discovered the freeing liberty of creating spatial installations.

Over the years I realized that I didn’t want to be

locked into conventional classifications. This actually rendered the understanding of my work more difficult since in general art-gallerists, critics and viewers prefer a reductive classification of the artist’s work.

All of my “versatile” forms of expressions grew organically as I wandered through my artistic journey. Creation should not be a set of tools one applies to ones ideas. True if you know how to use well the tools you’ve gain through your studies or your work in the studio you can do a good job but that is not enough. Creation comes from somewhere else where nothing is sure or safe. It’s a little like walking along a cliff on a foggy day. There might be a sense of danger to the unknown when leaving one’s comfort-zone, yet if you follow a path you know too well, how can you re-invent it or astonish yourself?

And to answer your question: yes, retroactively a multidisciplinary approach was the only way to explore what I was trying to express while creating, even if I did not formally study performance, video or photography. It just happened to be the right medium for the circumstances. Each medium taught me something new about the world, about art and about myself. It was extraordinary learning experiences.

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected the Wounded Land Trilogy, an extremely interesting video that reflect the multifaceted nature of our relationship to nature and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught our attention of your effective inquiry into the power of deconstruction is the way you have been capable of creating a concrete aesthetics from direct experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of the Wounded Land Trilogy would you tell us something about your usual process and set up? In particular, the Wounded Land Trilogy is centered on the consequences of the Second Lebanon War and the Gaza War: we have highly appreciated the way your approach goes beyond a merely interpretative

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aspect of the contexts you refer to. The Wounded Land Trilogy shows unconventional aesthetics in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of self-reflection. Would you shed a light about the role of metaphors in your process?

My creative process is organic and develops as a result of external and internal factors.

The Wounded Land Trilogy (2010-2015) is thus a part of a larger on-going project entitled Wounded Land started after the Second Lebanon War (2006) and succeeding to Border Land, a body of work created during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).

Wounded Land originated in the liminal space of a symbolic and metaphoric healing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which had become in my eyes a monstrous Sartrean existential “huis clos“. This healing took place by the deconstruction and the dressing of Closure Maps of Jerusalem, themselves a metaphor of a sick ‘patient’ suffering from an incurable chronic disease. Later, in the Trilogy, I undertook to heal the visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape, the city and the body.

But it is not possible to fully grasp the genesis of Wounded Land detached from Border Land and therefore I will introduced succinctly the latter.

Since the beginning of the Second Intifada I had been struggling in my studio with the dilemma of the following dialectics: formalist art versus the ere and Now March 2002 was a turning point after the suicide-bomb attack at the popular CafèMoment that took the lives of 11 Israeli civilians and injured tens of civilians who had just attended a rally for Peace near the Prime Minister residence. Standing on the ruins of what was once a cafè belonging to a relative and where I use to go regularly, I left

the comfort-zone of my studio in order to better understand the conflict. I started to walk the borderline, documenting the new reality of fences and checkpoints rising around the city of Jerusalem. To easily cross borders back and forth from Israel into the Palestinian territories and follow events in the territories as well as the Disengagement from the Gaza Strip, I became a news-photographer. This simultaneously aroused my consciousness to the plight of the Palestinians, as new walls, protective for the Israeli civilians, had tough consequences on their daily lives. And though being in places I would have avoided at any cost beforehand, paradoxically this helped me overcome my fears and transcend the existential chaos prompted by almost daily terror attacks throughout the country. From then on for several years, the field became my studio and news photography, often from a different perspective then that of a professional news-photographer, became an inseparable part of my art praxis. As a free-lancer during the years 2000-04, I joined various NGO groups and in 2005 during the Disengagement from the Gaza Strip I often accompanied Rina Castelnuevo, the New York Times photographer. Following the Second Lebanon War I covered several stories with the Middle East correspondent from the Swiss Newspaper Tages Anzeiger.

If maps of all kinds had shaped my artistic creativity for over two decades, during the Second Intifada they became a tool that triggered my perambulatory voyages to the borders.

Strangely and quite unexpectedly during my perambulations as a news- photographer, other boundaries of sorts related to phenomenology, conflict and landscape collapsed and performance became a new medium to explore. This taught me to follow an

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2013, Performance at the Lifta Spring

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inner creative urge that has no rules and no boundaries.

In 2004, in a vain and absurd effort to cure the city from its pathology of chronic violence, I performed a Surgical Operation on the checkpoints, barriers and road networks of Closure Maps, which data is collected by OCHA and then distributed by the UN offices in East Jerusalem. Actually following my travels to the borders, it was these same maps that had arose my awareness to cartographic inherent elusiveness and to the tangible geographical, political and cultural spaces they suppress.

Wounded Land and the Wounded Maps of Jerusalem.

Between 2003-2007, while closely monitoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a photojournalist, I had often wondered if it was still possible to ethically relate to the landscape in a romantic way. The Second Lebanon War broke out at the beginning of July 2006. I drove up North a few days before the cease fire, tanks and artillery were still deployed along the border. Walking between smoking burned trees and parts of missiles, I stopped in front of an olive tree ripped apart. A few days later, I left on a field trip to the forests of Biriya organized for the Foreign Press. The earth was covered with thick grey ash and the smell of smoke was still very strong. All around me stood endless rows of thin dark skeletons as dark as their shadows. Even though the sunset was still breathtaking, like before the war, the forest was now a sea of black trees: a wound in the landscape.

In the following years I worked in a more metaphorical way creating installations, using photographs and making performances, alone or together with other artists. Joint multi-media projects such as “Smoking Utopia� created with my colleague Reuven Zahavi were based

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2006, Cymbolic lightjet print on photographic paper, 90 x 120 cm, photo: Ariane Littman

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2012, Closure Maps, fabric, plaster and green thread, 77 x 92 cm, photo: Udi Katzman

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on my photographic expeditions to the borders.

By 2008 saturated by the sporadic cycles of violence, I stopped working as a news photographer and returned to the studio.

A few months later my daughter aged 8, was injured in an accident suffering third degree burns. The personal and the national wound intertwined.

I went back to the OCHA ‘s Closure Maps of 2004 and began cutting, dressing and plastering them. I further deconstructed the hierarchy of cartographic power by sewing as a decorative stitch the green letter “X”, indicating the ‘Barrier Gates’ on the original Closure Maps in a gallery in 2009. Evoking feminine mythic weavers across continents, the seamstress became for me a character carrying symbolic healing faculties, and more such sewing performances where held in “wounded“ sites.

Wearing a white skirt made of Closure Maps and gauzes, I sewed Wounded Maps in the 3 religious quarters of The Old City of Jerusalem in 2011 and two years later by the spring of Lifta, an abandoned Palestinian village where women were notorious for their famous bridal dresses and artistic embroidering needle-works.

The act of dressing using gauzes also took place at The Dead Sea (Sea of Death, 2010), at the Hizma checkpoint (The Olive Tree, 2011) and at the historical Hansen Hospital for Lepers in Jerusalem (Compassion, 2014), each performance being enacted as Sisyphean yet symbolic acts of healing.

The Wounded Land Trilogy also inquires into the interstitial space between personal and public spheres, providing the spectatorship with an immersive experience that forces such a contamination the inner and the outside: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space?

Regarding your question as to the relationship between personal and public spheres I would say that in general the performances begin with some kind of feeling and a general vision of what I seek to express. I can never know if it will succeed as there

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is no prior in situ rehearsal. But beforehand I try to connect to the place and to the object within the landscape where I choose to perform. I need to feel the place’s invisible and visible wounds and get a sense of the memory it evokes. I shall visit it several times and at different hours because I want it to connected to the higher circle of time: sunrise, sunset, full moon. I think that eventually, the performance is the result of all these enigmatic interactions between subjective and objective realities preferably without ‘a priori’ rules.

The places in which I performed took place in a very different geographical location and entailed different complications. Whether at a checkpoint, in the Old City of Jerusalem, at the Dead Sea or in an abandoned village at night, you need to be prepared for any scenario especially when you do weird things that are incomprehensible to the general public. I do not invite the public when I performed in open spaces unrelated to art galleries or museums.

Usually people that encounter my work are not art minded, sometime though I do get unexpected feedbacks from passer-by. But frankly, I do not think that it enters the rubric of what is called art in public space. I don’t think that what I do in the public space has an importance beyond the present moment of the performance. Whether located in public space or deserted areas my works are ephemeral.

I shall now proceed with the description of the performances of The Wounded Land Trilogy.

1. Sea of Death (2010) Featuring the relation between human finitude and ecological death, I held my performance, Sea of Death at sunset in July 2010 on the Northern shore of the Dead Sea, close to Qumran. Known since Biblical times, life, death and healing already coexisted there in Ancient Egypt. Providing special balms used for Egyptian mummification, the Dead Sea was a popular health resort during the Herodian

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Sewing a

at The Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem 2011, photo: Yair Tsriker

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2010, performance at the Dead Sea, photo: Jim Hollander

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period. It is still a highly popular health resort yet today the Dead Sea is dying due to enhanced industrial extraction of its minerals, sinkholes and its resulting drop of water level.

During the performance I was wrapped in gauzes and gradually immobilized, eventually disconnected from my environment. It was a challenging situation both physically and psychologically when mummified I was carried into the sea by two Palestinian men working in the premises. In this state of intense vulnerability, as I drifted away in the sea, I recall thinking of wars and mothers, pain and wounds, death and useless hopes.

Six month later I had the vision of dressing a dead olive tree, the symbol of peace. There was such an olive tree standing in a roundabout in proximity of a checkpoint on the North- Eastern Israeli defined Jerusalem municipal boundaries. A new challenge arose: how perform and film near a military checkpoint. This is part of the unexpected when you perform in a public space and you might be confronted to how far you are willing to take your art seriously. I performed there in July 2011.

2. The Olive Tree (2011) The performance took place at the Hizma’s checkpoint, where an olive tree emblematic of this land and of a long awaited peace, had been uprooted and replanted years ago. The tree had not survived the bleak environment of the walled landscape. Dead yet majestic in its bareness, it personified a silent casualty in the midst of this contested space, an impassible witness to the flow of Palestinian and Israeli cars driving around it in some mysterious dance devoid of violence. We filmed the tree at dawn and I started to dress the dead olive tree at noon. The sun was burning and the tree was high and big. Curious onlookers stopped to exchange a few words with the cameraman. But I quietly carried on the dressing embracing the tree, detached from the surrounding reality whilst trying to connect to the tree,

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speculating about its earlier life and mourning its present death. As I walked around the tree to wrap the trunk, thorns entered my bare feet and instinctively, I bandaged them in an act of identification. The dressing ended at sunset, I held my breath as I stepped back; the tree looked magnificent in the reddish light of dusk. Dressed in white like a bride, it seemed to resurrect, its loose straps of bandages dancing in the wind reaching towards the moon and the kites flying above the village of Hizma. As we drove away, I turned round to catch a last glimpse; the fleeting image of this ghostly tree dancing against the darkness of night will remain with me forever. The next morning once more the olive tree stood naked under the burning sun. Who could have ripped apart the bandages, I wondered?

A few months after The Olive Tree, I took my wounded maps and performed in the Old City of Jerusalem, it was not that simple and I was as I was bluntly told to leave the Western Wall and the Holy Sepulchre’s esplanade, my sewing “dishonoring” these sacred spaces.

The vision for the last performance for the Trilogy came to me as I was biking and saw in the horizon ruins near an old spring along the 49 Armistice borderlines not far from Malha. Eventually I performed in July 2013 in a different yet significant location, as I shall describe below. The Spring is a closure. If in Sea of Death the mummy disappears carried away into the Sea, here it reappears as the memory of the place and is reborn.

The Spring (2013) The performance The Spring was held in Lifta. Known in the Bible as Nephtoah, the village of Lifta was a border between the Israelite tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Populated by various people throughout ancient times, the village had been repeatedly invaded by armies on their way to Jerusalem. A prosperous village under the British Mandate, one

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2011, performance at the Hizma checkpoint, photo: Rina Castelnuevo

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2013, performance at the Lifta Spring, photo: Yair Triker

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tenth of the land was owned and inhabited by Jews and the rest by Arabs. Yet, Lifta was not spared in the wake of the Arab-Jewish hostilities of 1947- 48 when the Jewish paramilitary organization of the Haganah fought the villagers during the Siege of Jerusalem while securing the western exit of the city. The Arab villagers fled, never to return and Lifta was eventually demolished except for a few houses. Since, squeezed between two highways, the uninhabited village, like countless vestiges of past civilizations in Jerusalem, stands as a silent wound in the landscape.

During the performance, the seamstress emerges at full moon from the entrance of the narrow heart of the spring carrying a Wounded Map. She sits and stitches by the pool, evoking mythic weavers and the Arab seamstresses of Lifta. The very act of sewing to the sound of a magic flute brings to life the mummified spirit of the place that metamorphoses at dawn into a young maid. Entering the cold water of the spring to purify herself, she then received from the seamstress the white dress of the future weaver of life.

Your exploration of the intrinsic power of deconstruction accomplishes an effective investigation about the relationship between perception, memory and personal imagination, to challenge the viewers' parameters. What is the role of memory in your work? We are particularly interested in how you consider memory and its evokative role in showing an alternative way to escape and overcome the recurrent reality.

Decostruction and memory have always been important themes in my work in general and my performance in particular but also the mediums of photography and film are intrinsically linked to deconstruction, reconstruction and memory.

As I said previously, I need to connect to the place where I choose to perform so I make researches. For instance when I was invited in 2014 to do a work at the Hansen Lepers House in Jerusalem, now a

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contemporary art space, I read a lot about it and visited several times to get a sense beyond what was present. After seeing bandages among the original momento mori kept in a few rooms, and after reading “Nursing the Lepers in Jerusalem,” published in the British Journal of Nursing, I decided to perform a ceremonial feet-washing to anyone entering through the courtyard gate. The performance together with three other women lasted 7 hours involving a nonstopping flow of viewers. Compassion not only symbolically evoked the history of ‘Jesus Hilfe,’ a place where Moravian nurses carried out daily actions of clemency towards the Lepers of Jerusalem since 1887 but it also offered a symbolic reenactment of their hard work. The performance suggested in an universal way, the feeling of empathy vis-àvis disease, difference and alienation, creating a sense of care and humility in a site which still silently bore the secret of its ancient wound.

Whether the films bring forth the memory of ephemeral performances reenacted time an again or a memory of an olive tree uprooted a few years later, it is always a wound of a sort.

The films I produce based on my performance are not documentaries of those actions. They are new creation that can take several months or years to produce. It’s a long and fascinating process that involves many other aspects of creativity, like sound for instance. So whilst working on the olive tree, I felt I needed two female voices. When Ruth Wieder Magan, an extraordinary performer and singer, and Salam Abu Amneh from a village not far from Nazareth agreed to be part of that project The Olive Tree became a tribute to mothers on both sides of the wall.

A Dadaist Deconstruction As I explained previously the Wounded Maps are a deconstruction of cartographic power and so were the series of maps titled Shredded Land, created in 2010. Feeling powerless in face of the non-ending cycle of violence, I shredded and molded Closure Maps at the Bezalel Academy paper workshop, creating a

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2014, performance at the Hansen House in Jerusalem, photo: Udi Katzman

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2010, papier maché of Closure Maps, 55 x 64 cm, photo: Udi Katzman

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series of 13 maps offering each time a different reality.

In the very act of shredding, these new maps reinvented themselves out of what was once the hegemonic power of closure. Discarding all mapping conventions, incising and reshuffling borders, I create maps in the same way that Tristan Tzara had randomly used cut-out words from a daily newspaper to create his first Dadaist poem in 1917. And whilst reinventing in the studio these new symbolic “borderscapes”, I felt I could overcome the paralyzing effect of uncontrollable violence experienced by civilians.

The deconstruction and sewing of the Wounded Maps at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (2012) together with extracts from ‘DADA’, a film by Greta Deses awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1967, weaves the thread of DADA-JERUSALEM (2014), a film in homage to the artists whom in reaction to the horrors of WWI created the DADA movement. The sound for the movie is a recitation of Dadaist Hugo Ball’s first abstract phonetic poem: ’O Gadji Beri Bimba’. His poem ‘Elefantenkarawane, first declaimed at the Cabaret Voltaire in June 1916 is re-enacted in Deses 1967’s movie.

And while running to bomb shelters during the Gaza War of 2014, DADA-Jerusalem revived a 100 years later the timeless Dadaist spirit as best described by Hans Arp: “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”

As you have remarked once, life in Israel is an existential reality where choices about what to look at and what to ignore are made almost on a daily basis: So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

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I tend to believe that no art can really be disconnected from direct experience. Art being the expression of personal experiences and choices, whether you decide to relate in a more Kantian “disinterestedness” to art or in a more contextual and situational way. I always mention when I lecture abroad about my work that, had I been living in Paris, New York or London, the content and the form of my art would have been different.

It was just one of these choices I made up quite early upon finishing art school as I locked myself up in my studio, in search for a personal language whilst reflecting on the meaning of being an artist here and now. I started already back at the beginning of 90’s to work around the notion of The “Holy Land”. That was a crucial decision that would influence all my future artistic language without me knowing it at the time.

As you have remarked once, the meaning of the ‘Land’ in your work evolved towards an enhanced ironic commodification of Holy Land artifacts, an erasure of cartographic power in ‘White Land,’ and a gendered highlighting of the womb/tomb Mother Land: elements from environment are particularly recurrent in your imagery and they never plays the role of a mere background. Do you see a definite relationship between the notion of land and your work?

Yes indeed, my work is intrinsically related to the notion of the land and I invite the readers to take a journey through my site, as it would be too long to go in depth into each of them. Each project, whether Holy Land, White Land, Mother Land, Border Land and Wounded Land are all interrelated facets of that specific notion, a very important issue for someone as rootless as me, the daughter of a refugee from Egypt and with Polish ancestors whose roots were torn off from their land endlessly. But beside a personal biography, I carry within me the collective memory of my People with its painful history of exile spanning over millenniums and that is bound to influence you whether you want or not, especially when the land is a conflictual issue.

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still from video

2014

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2015, video installation at The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington (USA), photo: Carson

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When inquiring into the process of commodification of the words Holy Land you convey an effective socio political criticism concerning our materialistically driven culture that saturate our contemporary age. But while artists from the contemporary scene, as Ai WeiWei or more recently Jennifer Linton, use to express open socio-political criticism in their works, you seem more interested to hint the direction, inviting the viewers to a process of self-reflection that may lead to subvert a variety of usual, almost stereotyped cultural categories. Do you consider that your works could be considered political in a certain sense or did you seek to maintain a more neutral approach? And in particular, what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in the contemporary society?

Indeed all of the artifacts in the Holy Land Project tries to generate a tension between the words “Holy Land” on the one hand and political or economic interests on the other, as I began inquiring into the process of commodification of the (unholy) Holy Land.

And while taking my inspiration from the “sacred” water, earth, oil and flowers sold in tiny bottles around religious sites, I expanded this holiness to industrial products already sold on the market (honey jars, mineral water bottles, JNF blue boxes) creating new products. Consequently I started collaborating with public and private companies and with several Kibbutzim. Sometimes a new edited text was inserted in their logo or new objects were created incorporating the logo of the company. These rectified items were then signed and numbered and relocated into an artistic context.

Regarding the less open socio-political criticism that you mention in contradiction with the work of Ai Wei Wei and Jennifer Linton, I will say that as my art took on a more political turn with Border Land, I sensed the danger of simplistic slogans. I had to find a way to deal with a political reality and yet without falling into the easy cliché that I saw in Zullinger

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the media. That was a real challenge. I became more interested in engaging the viewer in a process of self-reflection vis-a-vis my artwork then in trying to say who is right or wrong.

Therefore metaphors are important, as with poetry. I also believe that subtle art, even with a local flavor, can definitely carry a universal message.

Each artist needs to make a choice when he creates but his role is defined by a huge infrastructure that he rarely controls. Sometime he can help to see differently, and this is worthwhile the creative voyage.

As to the role of the artist in society, I am sometime desperate, but I do have some hope.

The Mobile Forests are just one example of the influence my art actually had on reality.

Following my research into a family memorial forest donated in 1967 through the Jewish National Fund, I discovered to my astonishment that the forest became, at some unknown point, a closed military censored area. I created numerous works related to the Forbidden Forest, culminating in 2001 in White Land, a diptychs work composed of 35 military censored aerial photographs. These ready-mades formed a quilt-like map of the Holy Land linked through its white missing pieces. In this work I intertwined personal biography (the Grandfather Forbidden Forest), collective myths (the Jewish National Fund), formal aesthetic concerns (the flat abstractedness of aerial landscapes) and military cartographic production of power. A month before the exhibition at the Artist’s House, it made the front page of the local newspaper in Jerusalem following which I was contacted by the Jewish National Fund. Ultimately in November 2003, maybe as a result of my art ‘actions’, a rededication of the ‘Littman Forest Outlook’ took place in the British Park of Bet Shemesh in memory of the ‘invisible’ 20’000 trees planted in the original Forest.

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1994-2002 (detail) photo: Ariane Littman

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2001, 35 censored aerial photographs, 150 x 210 cm, photo: Mike Ganor

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Over your two decades long career you have exhibited in numerous museums and galleries. One of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship like in your performance Compassion exhibited at The Hansen Hospital in Jerusalem and the solo Healing, at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts curated by J.Susan Isaacs and part of the important Israeli group show exhibition Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art, cocurated by Dr. Martin Rosenberg and J.Susan Isaacs.

So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

Indeed already in some of my 1990 installation my work engaged the viewers. Sometimes they are inside the performance for instance when I operated on the Closure Maps in Surgical Operation produced in the attic of the Anglican School, or in my performance Erasure in 2006 where I erased a 1947 map of Jerusalem at the Science Museum in Jerusalem. In Compassion as mentioned previously, the public became itself an active subject in the work itself. I consider the issue of the audience to be crucial in the sense that I do hope they engage in what I try to express and in the best of cases I hope it opens in them new ways of seeing but they are never a component of any of my decision-making process. My creative process as I said at the beginning is a never-ending thread I need to follow like Theseus followed Ariadne’s thread inside the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaure. But unlike him, I need to get lost in the labyrinth in order to let new works spring from the unknown. I can’t make compromise and start to think what will please or displease the audience.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your

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thoughts, Ariane. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I do not have presently future projects besides working in the studio on more maps from the series Grafted Land, one of which was exhibited Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art, a show that is planned to tour the USA. I have in my head several short movies I’d like to produce but I don’t have the budget right now, so I just leave them to “cook” in my head.

I usually never work for a future exhibition that might or might not pop up, a prize or a recognition I might or might not get. Had I done that, probably I’d have created half my body of work. I just continue to work,

sometime it is slower and sometime it is more intense. I learned over the years that the void is sometime part of the creative process. I don’t question these fluctuations anymore, at time it use to frightened me but now I just let it happen because I’ve come to realize that it’s an organic process related to creativity.

I’m starting to teach a new semester at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem where I have been teaching at the Design Department since 1998. I share with my students my love of the arts and enjoy seeing them discover their own creative language.

That is in itself an important project.

I would like to thank you again for having offered me the opportunity to share some of my work and thoughts with your readers.

: Border Land: http://ariane-littman.com/subject-intro-pages/border-land/ Wounded Land:http://ariane-littman.com/subject-intro-pages/wounded-land/ Holy Land:http://ariane-littman.com/subject-intro-pages/holy-land/ White Land:http://ariane-littman.com/2001/05/white-land/?setslidercat=white-land Mother Land:http://ariane-littman.com/subject-intro-pages/mother-land/ Map Land:http://ariane-littman.com/subject-intro-pages/map-land/

Sea of Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1axF9NFGLY The Olive Tree:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_iBjcbuzfs The Spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHMA49LREM DADA-JERUSALEM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwahnbvyWro Border Land Alternative Ways of Mapping Jerusalem (2012): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAMujZWlXG4

, Jerusalem Photo: Yair Tsriker

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J ulia Six Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA

I

am interested in the blurry area the in-between, the space that holds the tension of the real and imagined, the outside and inside, the natural and man-made. It is in the blurry-area that I explore, seeking to make sense of the world.

Through material investigations, repetitive processes, and precarious placement, I build installations and sculptures reminiscent of a landscape, yet somewhere between the real and perceived. Most recently, I have drawn inspiration from the American backyard, a pseudo natural space manicured to fit the boundaries of home, yet outside the private domestic space. The homeowner defines this public space this is the in verses out. The homeowner decides what happens in this private yet public landscape known as the backyard, but only to a certain degree.

Backyard landscapers cannot control all that penetrates the boundaries of their picket fences. I use this in-between scenery to reflect our projected, public personalities versus our private innermost thoughts.

Finding a balance between the public versus private is a task I explore in my studio practice.

Inside and outside of the studio walls, I obsess over an object, an event, a person, a song, a word, a conversation, a book, a process, a sentence, a material. I compulsively repeat things over and over

again in my head and my actions. The to-do list never seems to dwindle but gains mass as a comforting mechanism. Obsessive making, staying busy, and endless repetition have become more than a way of working they are the content of the work itself. I am drawn to the piles I acquire and how they begin to reflect my obsessions. The objects I compulsively make are stand- ins for the compulsive thoughts that crowd my mind. The objects create a physical space that mirrors a psychological space that exists in a personal and solitary way.

Through placement, excess, scale shifts, precarious balance and obsessive repetition, I explore the conflicting narrative of here or there. I invite the viewer to wander through a familiar landscape that through subtle details, throw off their perception of the space they are in, and what is actually happening. During the making and the installing of the work, I find a balance between a didactic and open storyline.

This is a task that I welcome. It keeps me interested in the constant shifting and play that is involved in my creative practice and the results of my obsessive actions. Often times my work invites the viewer to navigate through a world of piles, stacks, hidden structures and repeating symbols, encouraging them to build upon the open narrative I've laid out for them and begin to interject their own storyline.

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LandEscape meets

Julia Six An interview by and

, curator , curator

Hello Land scape readers, it’s an honor to be here! So yes, from an early age I’ve been making things and I don’t just mean art. For example: By age 3 I could crack an egg without getting any shell in the cake batter (perhaps an early indicator of excellent dexterity.) The brightly patterned quilt that I made at sewing camp when I was not yet 10 years old is still hanging around my parents’ home, as is the framed watercolor that I painted on poster board when I was

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Julia Six

Julia Six

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CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

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Julia Six

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

four. The impact of having been exposed to and praised for my culinary and sewing skills from a young age no doubt continues to influence my choices, vocabulary, and processes. The very idea that they are often considered “women’s work” now intrigues me as I realize how ingrained they are in my creative process. While I was not introduced to the study of photography until high school, and it is less present today in my practice, the foundation of finding or creating a composition is one of the biggest markers of my work. When I create an installation or even a table-top sculpture, visual composition is always the starting point. The cultural influence and formal training that has contributed to my artistic skills thus far have impacted my work on many levels. All are considered when I step into my studio. As an artist, I am consciously aware of what I gravitate towards, why I’m making the choices I make.

Throughout the process of making art, I am asking myself if my choices are consistent with what I deem to be important when it comes to art that will be viewed by an audience apart from myself. Any discussion of my evolution as an artist must include the story of a giant teal boulder that resulted as a challenge by one of my professors, who encouraged me to make something larger than myself.

At the time, I had been making work

revolving around everyday household objects of “manageable size.” For reasons still blurry to me, I knew I needed to think about landscapes — how I interact with them, how they affect our daily habits, and all the while I was asking myself how to talk about the giant block I was feeling in my studio at the time. It was then that I had this urge to make a boulder—a giant boulder! I knew almost automatically that the boulder needed to be bright, bold, and as far from the color of a true boulder as I could imagine. Up until then, I was sticking to a “serious” palette of black, white, red, etc. However, when I got the urge to make an 8foot by 6-foot paper mache boulder it had to be electric teal. Creating this enormous brightly colored boulder literally changed everything, setting me free to use bold colors and make bigger than life art, which may have led me, more recently, to shift to the opposite extreme of miniatures.

Seriously, that rock changed everything.

Julia Six

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Julia Six

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Absolutely. I’ve never been interested in the idea of sticking to one material or process—I like the aesthetic of mixed media installation and sculpture, but the heart of it is that I enjoy the variety in my studio.

I’ve found that switching gears on a regular basis in my practice helps me tease out ideas, solve problems and keeps me on my toes. Most of the time I have about 3 to 4 projects happening at once, ranging from a series of drawings that then influence the ceramic sculpture I’m working on and inevitably that ceramic object eventually ends up in a larger installation. This flow of ideas and processes is the only way that works for me.

Going back to an earlier question about how my education has influenced the way I approach art and my studio practice, I’d say the most significant two things I’ve learned during the last couple of years has been to be curious and to trust myself. Both of these were major parts of the process for creating Hunkering & Bunkering (H&B). I operated under the motto of “make first, think second,” as a way to avoid paralysis-by-analysis. So that’s exactly what I did. I followed every urge in the studio. If I felt like I needed more concrete-like blocks, I’d get started right then and there. If I felt like I needed to fiber-flock a 18x18 foot camping tarp, I did it--not totally aware of why I wanted to make “so-and-so” but knowing that there was a reason I was interested in it, and trusting that eventually I would use it. I wasn’t going to talk myself out of trusting my own intuition. Creating a stock-pile of objects that interest me is the way I work best. During the making of H&B, I would refer to everything I was making as being part of a visual library. So, as you can imagine and see from the photos, I ended up with

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a gallery-full of seemingly unrelated objects. Having total freedom in a gallery is an artist’s dream, which is what I had for H&B. The installation followed a process similar to the creating of the various objects trusting my intuition; being curious to how things could balance together -visually and physically; and continually questioning and exploring the relationships between objects by walking throughout the space after every change to see how the flow might affect the viewer.

As an artist I sense an obligation to consider how the viewer is going to see, experience--and to some extent-perceive the work. I’m not in the camp of “I’m just going to make what I want and the interpretation rests in the viewers’ hands.” I consider my audience, especially for an immersive installation. It’s always been a teameffort in my opinion. I’m going to do my best to convey an idea and give the audience enough information to go there with me, while allowing them the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

For me, it’s about finding a balance between too much and not enough;

Julia Six

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Land

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Julia Six

Julia Six

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CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

finding that sweet spot of “just right” is always my target. As I mentioned, I was “making first, thinking second” when it came to H&B, but from the very get-go of this project, the major absolute was that I wanted to create a space for viewers to experience that wasn’t the typical gallery setting. During the making and installation of H&B I considered how viewers would read the materials; how they would walk through the space; and what feelings might arise within them because of the choices I was making. The audience became a very important aspect of the work because the experience of the installation really changed and became something different depending on the size and nature of those who were walking through it at any given time. What had appeared to be a semi-large open area prior to the viewers being present, suddenly felt packed when surrounded by towers and piles the viewers began milling throughout the installation-and that was exactly how I wanted the space to be experienced. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn't trying to make my audience feel unsafe or claustrophobic—instead, I created a space that invited the viewer to come down the rabbit hole with me--to not only see the art, but to experience moving through it and by so doing becoming a key player in the installation.

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I respond so much to texture--how it feels in my hand and how it reads visually. A great example of this is the concrete-like blocks I made for Hunkering & Bunkering. I made them by using fiber-based home insulation, which I made into a paper-pulp, using wallpaper paste as the glue. It came out to be this clumpy yet smooth paste. I loved the feel of it in my hands while I layered it onto cardboard boxes.

I think about this question on a pretty regular basis, actually. What does mark the difference between real and unreal? Is it that we only experience something we would consider to be “unreal” in our heads, so thus it isn’t something that should be dealt with just as much as the chair I’m looking at from across the

Julia Six

Julia Six

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Land

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Julia Six

Julia Six

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room? It all seems too blurry to me still — just because something isn’t sitting in front of me doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting me in one way or another. That brings me back to that giant teal boulder. I had this block in the studio and anyone who is involved in any sort of creative process will know that a block is just as real as a boulder. Imagine a huge boulder lodged in your doorway--immoveable.

So while the “fakeness” of the boulder was a key part of it, it was nonetheless still physically blocking myself and others from entering a space. It was fake yet very real. After the boulder, the root of most of my work became about blurring the line between the real and the perceived unreal. Finding a balance between the real and unreal is something I’m constantly playing with-- especially because I have a tendency toward abstraction, so I am very conscious of providing objects or markers for the audience to be able to grab hold of, and relate to in some way. In the Grass Is Greener, I had the abstracted forms that I simply enjoyed making, and they sat around on my shelf for a while--not really sure what to do with them yet. Then the flow happened. As I was working on a drawing I realized the lumpy forms were hills — so as a means of conveying that to the viewer, I selected the green flocking.

It’s about finding an in-between space with the abstracted forms that are recognizable enough for the viewer,

but still lets there be a question of real or fake. They could be hills, but if I had decided they were crystals of some kind, purple would have been a better choice. Color really is a major player in my work--not just because I respond to it personally, but because it is a signifier to the audience of what something is or is not. Often color is what makes the difference between what is literal and what is an abstraction.

I love thinking about my work as having a narrative! I’m interested in straddling the line that suggests a narrative, but isn’t giving the audience the whole story. While I bring my own history, context and suggestions to a piece or installation, I expect the viewer to do the same. So by giving a suggestion that there is a story happening within the work, I

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hope to encourage the audience to play off of what I have done and bring their own experiences to the narrative.

Some may argue that it is the artist’s job to dictate a message or story to the audience, however, I am not in that camp. I enjoy having a gap available for people to enter into the work. I think this happens in my work when I follow my intuition — by not having all the answers before I start making the art. By allowing myself to move in and out of the “gap,” I’m letting the narrative come out in an organic way.

It always seems so simple when asked a question about how my work fits together because my theory is this: I’ve made all the work myself, so yes, it will all fit together because it is all from me. The visual unity simply occurs in the same way: I made this and this and this, so that and that and that will also work with this because all share a common origin—that being me.

No, I do not think any art can be disconnected from the maker’s experience. In my studio I’ve tried to do this. I’ve deliberately tried to shut out—exclude--a particular event from entering my creative space, but when I look back a week, a month or even a year later, yup, there it is. Despite my conscious effort, that which I intentionally attempted to ban from the studio has wormed its way in and affected the work in one way or another. I’d say personal experience is not only indispensable to the creative process but unavoidable. But the thing is, when I have been intentional about conveying a direct experience in a work-- no matter how uniquely mine the experience may be—I find that still has a universal quality that invites viewers into a relationship with it. Face it, there is nothing new under the sun.

Every experience we have has already happened to someone else. So yes, there are certainly some experiences that are more universally shared than others, but attempting to identify the universal apart from the role of personal experience is futile—if not impossible. The same is true of my work: it would be impossible to void my work of my experiences.

Julia Six

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CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

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Julia Six

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Yes, I am always conscious of my audience, especially when it involves immersing them into an environment I’ve created. I’ve never seen myself as making the work “for the audience” but they are taken into consideration, absolutely. As far as language goes, I do choose objects, markers and the like that are accessible to a broad audience. I’m not interested in work that is only readable to the minority that has read a certain art theory or philosopher. I intend for my work to be relatable to an audience beyond my circle of peers. The choice to offer readable work to a large audience does, in turn, impact some of the choices I make. The more diverse the audience the more difficult it is to discern the line between “too much information or not enough.” By choosing to work with a visual vocabulary made up of images from a home, a landscape or even a supermarket, I’m encouraging the viewer to bring their own context and meaning to the work.

I’m looking forward to the next phase of my studio work. It always feels like having a fresh start, yet the ideas and interests that have really resonated with me thus far in my career continue to surface. Because I’ve trusted my process for a while now, I’m currently making a new “visual library” that I’ll be able to play with soon—trusting that what I’m making is in tune with the ideas I’m thinking. At this moment my studio has about 5 things happening at once—as I mentioned, this is the way I work best.

Right now the list includes a sitespecific performance with a collaborator, a series of large drawings, a set of miniature ceramic sculptures, and my on- going search for the best way to capture the essence of a line drawing and transform it into a tangible object—which I’m currently doing using wire and masking tape. I’m always amazed by the artistic process--how one idea that seems totally unrelated to anything else suddenly makes complete sense when viewed in relationship to everything else—it’s all part of the larger landscape.

An interview by and

, curator , curator

Julia Six

Land

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CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW