If I was Body

In his paintings and drawings, Sasha (Alexander) Okun seeks new plastic
and aesthetic regularity in continuation of the European figurative painting
tradition. He combines absurdity and pain, ugliness and beauty, realism
and surrealism, to create tragicomic worlds centered on the human body,
both singular and plural. In his paintings, the female and male bodies,
rooted in the existential solitude of everyday routine, become primordial
landscapes, and viewers are invited to contemplate the different
perceptions of reality that appear before them. Despite (or because of)
its transience, the body in Okun’s painting—which encapsulates time,
history, and space—is infinite.
In the painting featured in the exhibition, the professed sloppiness
of the grotesque figure negates accepted definitions of beauty and
aesthetics. The body is neither hidden nor disguised, and it is precisely
the presentation of things as they are that generates harmony with the
landscape in which it stands with its back to us, as a body gradually
turning into spirit. Matter becomes anti-matter, and the image seems to
hover, dissolving into the line and the stains of color, freeing itself from
mimetic representation and producing the sound of poetry.

Yakira Ament’s new body of work, created over the past year, emerged
from the drawing Mud and Smoke (2022), now joined by two Sprout
drawings, together forming a triptych of a primordial storm. Alongside
these she has created an array of two-part sculptures—totems of fertility
or spell casting/removal. The titles reflect the materials from which the
works were made—drawings and sculptures that resemble bodies in the
process of constant creation, before the separation of darkness and light,
earth and heavens. These fantastic, mysterious sculptures—hybrids of
nature and culture, beast and human—harbor explosive energies. In their
movement between figuration and abstraction, and between order and
chaos, they evoke the creatures populating Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais
Idéal (Ideal Palace), holding up a mirror to the anxious human soul.
Ament explores the physical-metaphysical transformation of form
and matter, tracing cyclical processes of renewal and deconstruction. The
works bear the imprints of the hands that created them, the processes of
their formation as bodies in progress, embodying a yearning for expansion
and continuity.

Adi Argov’s engagement with the body echoes her personal struggle with
physical limitations resulting from lupus, which she developed about a
decade ago. Her Sisyphean treatment of the physical and mental trauma,
in an attempt to relieve the pain and move freely, finds its way into her
drawings, which are also a tool for meditative, physical, and artistic
practice, similar to kinesics—the study of how body movements and
gestures are used in non-verbal communication.
Argov draws with acrylic pens on Kozo paper, based on a method she
developed that combines various signs with line drawings of body parts,
skeletons, joints, and figures, either human-figurative or hybrid. Within
the drawings, she writes in a code language she invented, incorporating
elements from Braille and movement scripts such as Eshkol-Wachman
movement notation, Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis, experimental
music scores, medieval choreography diagrams, and ancient maps. The
various signs lose their original meaning and become clusters of actions,
while the repetition generates a lexicon of images and shapes in layers of
drawing. In the animated works, the drawings transform into breathing
bodies, living systems.

Berlin-based Rimma Arslanov’s paintings unveil playful circus-like, yet
melancholic compositions, dreamy worlds that shimmer like visions or
hide behind curtains. The series of paintings shown here evolved during
the war. It began with drawings made as part of an artist’s residency at
Artport, and was completed especially for the exhibition, expressing a
sense of the body’s disintegration, a continuous disdain for physical and
psychological existence to the point of peeling off its skin. What remains
are surrealistic amorphous masses bearing memories of the past in
the form of earrings, fingerprints, or the roof of a house. The dissolving
portraits convey an elusive fragility, as the cold, blue-purple hues are
associated with the body’s interior—alive and breathing, but also bleeding
and transmitting coldness, repression, and distance.

Doris Arkin creates sculptures and installations through an ongoing
laborious manual process of cutting and joining, piercing and connecting,
in materials such as iron and bronze, fabric, paper, wax, threads, scrap
metal, and personal objects. From all of these, she assembles grids and
weaves, which in turn spawn three-dimensional bodies, structures that
record personal and collective memory as vestiges of an absent presence.
The work Matter alludes to the material of creation and the
universe, while also encapsulating the word “mother” (mater, in Latin).
It is a sculpture resembling a well or a basket from which a cloth of sorts
flows. Both are made of metal, emerging like primordial matter, with the
metallic textile seemingly stretching and spilling outwards. The oozing
mass carries memories and emotions of the vulnerable body, of which
only traces remain as soft-looking remnants despite their actual rigidity.
The work was first exhibited at the Beit Uri and Rami Nehostan Museum,
Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov Meuchad.
An integral part of Arkin’s sculptural work is a private collection of
fertility and maternal figurines. The collection, assembled over more than
15 years from various sources, includes figurines from the Middle and Far
East, Europe, Africa, and America, which represent diverse and distinct
aspects of motherhood in ancient and tribal cultures. The physicalemotional
expression of the figurines in the collection is interwoven in
Matter, forming a timeless artistic dialogue that introduces a space for
reflection on the nature of human bonding.

The body is a central player in Yasmin Davis’s video works, but its
boundaries are constantly challenged as an elusive image between the
illusory and the corporeal. In Rustle, the body as a substance or trace
flickers in minute, almost imperceptible occurrences.
The artist’s body is examined in relation to the viewer and the
barrier between interior and exterior, as a separating layer that protects
the house from the outside world. The hands affirm the existence of
the partitioning, and at the same time—the closeness between mother
and daughter in the inevitable process of separation occurring as one
body transitions into two autonomous ones. The filming of Rustle, which
debuted at the Artists Residence Herzliya, began shortly after the birth
of Davis’s daughter and continued for three years, exploring the trinity of
reality, image, and language. As in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, external
reality is reflected as an image through the mediation of shadows on the
curtains of the house, and the artist conveys that reality to her daughter
using the language she is learning to recognize.

Muhammad Toukhy explores themes pertaining to place and belonging,
home and protection, reflecting the Palestinian cultural heritage. Born
and raised in Jaffa to a family deeply rooted in the city for generations,
he regards the body and space as a physical infrastructure that bears
political meanings. His works reveal the process of the body becoming
a “structure” for others to read and interpret, in a visual language that
seeks to deconstruct its baggage.
Toukhy reimagines designs and ornaments in which he finds spatial
potential, viewing them as an object that has the power to expand and
spread by virtue of its infinitely repeated pattern. His work emerges from
“structures that may resemble a carpet, a mattress, even a tomb, but he
constructs them in digital spaces that have no direct physical existence,”
as he attests. In the next sculpting phase, he uses materials from the
worlds of construction, computer processing technologies (CNC), and
3D printing. In doing so, he allows the body and the space to redefine
themselves and their interrelations.

Nirit Takele’s paintings are centered on massive, monumental sculptural
human figures. At times they depict a single figure, but more often they
feature social-communal ensembles. Another striking feature is the
vivid coloration in shades of red, blue, orange, and brown, which took
root in her paintings after a sojourn in Ethiopia in 2017, during which
she became closely acquainted with the local culture of her country
of origin, the colorful clothing, and the landscapes. The bodies of the
Jewish-Israeli woman and man of Ethiopian descent in her paintings carry
a soft, heroic power of friendship and attention. Inspired by modernist
muralist painting, Takele conveys the resilience of the Ethiopian Jewish
community (Beta Israel), while also addressing themes pertaining to
identity and immigration in general.
In the painting The Glass Mantra You Wanted Me to Adopt, Takele
challenges the inherent biases against immigrants and newcommers, while
also highlighting the discrimination faced by other social minorities, such
as gender or ethnic groups—framing their achievements as examples of
those who “broke the glass ceiling.” This is symbolically represented by
a transparent, almost invisible strip, outlined above the dynamic mass of
men in the painting. In the New Body Part paintings, created especially
for the exhibition, Takele touches on the wounded, amputated, gilded
body as if it were a precious jewel.

The point of departure for Avital Cnaani’s works is her own body. Its
abstraction serves her to create sculptural bodies from such materials
as wood and paper. In the exhibition, she installs a new spatial array
of wood and paper sculptures that conduct a dialogue—narrow bodies,
bent like stems or branches, topped by large aquatint etchings bathed in
a bright, sensual and dreamy blue. The large-scale etchings hang in the
air, themselves forming three-dimensional bodies, carrying the memory
of the plates from which they were printed and hand-cut in an almost
sculptural manner. Cnaani likens the paper to a body that bends, sprawls
and stretches, like a garment, folded in a wardrobe that remembers
the body; like a map that conceals depth and distance, land, water and
horizon. The branches and stems also seem to bend and bow their heads.
Cnaani’s work converses with modernist sculpture in Israeli art—
the masculine sculpture in iron and bronze—and even with the work of
her grandfather, Yehiel Shemi, who pioneered abstract sculpture and
sought movement and softness in metals. Cnaani, in turn, introduces
a dialogue with nature and the human body through a choreography of
movement in matter—in her case, the paper or wood; while exploring
the essence of the stain and the line, she strives for the material’s most
ethereal dimensions.

Ofer Lellouche explores universal elements in the manifestations of the
world. His figurative-looking imagery is, in fact, a product of reduction,
seeking the essence of things in the space between representation of
reality and formal refinement. In this ongoing journey of deciphering, he
creates multiple versions—in sculpture, painting, drawing, and print—
addressing recurring themes: still life, landscape, and most notably the
human figure. Even in self-portraits, Lellouche’s figures are devoid of
identifiable personality traits, imbuing the works with a quality that is
both archaic and futuristic, immortal and enigmatic in its anonymity.
Comprising five sculptures created by Lellouche for a
comprehensive exhibition in China—Male Head, Seated Man, Standing
Woman, Pregnant Woman, and Female Head—the monumental sculptural
suite Atelier, After Courbet is now being shown in Israel as an ensemble for
the first time. Observation of random groupings of sculptures kept on the
studio shelves yielded a cluster of sculptures which together form a hand.
This group may be described as a collection of “corporeal entities”—whole
or partially severed, female and male—that maintain formal and abstract,
physical and psychological affinities. In their existential solitude, they
support each other. The cluster of works is a tribute to Gustave Courbet’s
realistic-allegorical 1855 painting, The Painter’s Studio, expressing
reflection on the work of art and its affect in the world.

From the outset of her artistic career in the 1990s, Hila Lulu Lin Farah
Kufer Birim has created a unique, distinctive, groundbreaking language,
centered on her own body and on objects that she deconstructs and
reconstructs to defy definitions and challenge fixed perceptions of
passion, beauty, and protest. Her works in diverse media—video, sculpture,
drawing, artist’s books, concrete poetry—introduce cyborg hybrids that
spawn a differentiated aesthetics, surrendering pain and discontent,
disruption and gender fluidity. Her oeuvre at large is a fantastic-allegorical
network, proposing exceptional, critical and scathing associations
between the politics of the most private, autobiographical and bleeding,
and that of the collective and of conflictual symbols and values.
The two video works featured in the exhibition, both from the turn
of the 20th century and the early 2000s, connect the seductive body,
exposed in its fragility, with another element, both artificial and organic:
a flower that she constructs and deconstructs, and then reconstructs
against her bare thighs, or a heart of frozen milk gradually melting between
her thighs. The images are mesmerizing in their persistence, tenacious
in their poetics of outcry.

In her oeuvre from the mid-1990s to the present, Sigalit Landau has
examined the imprints of the past and history on contemporary Israeli
reality. Quintessential characteristics of the local social, cultural, and
scenic space transform into expressive allegories, iconic in their power,
centered on the body. Natural and manmade habitats converge in bodies
that are compressed in excess and congestion.
The sculpture Rock-a-Bye Baby (Comfort Zone as per the Hebrew
title), debuting here, continues a chapter from a series of sculptures
created by Landau in 2013 for her exhibition at the Negev Museum of Art.
The series engages with maternity, while conversing with iconographic
images from the history of art, such as the Madonna and Child, or the
sculpture presented here—a marble nursing pillow, which resembles a
soft and flexible transitional object. The object’s lines are delicate, like
those of natural forms, conveying a sense that is antithetical to the hard
material from which it is made. The transformation of the maternal bond
from a human body to a body-object, in addition to the ironic title, results
in playfulness mixed with pain in its reference to the physical-mental
bond and its reflection in sculpture as expressive means.

Maya Muchawsky Parnas presents a repetitive array of sculptural bodies—
oval frames containing parts of relief-like images of nature and still life
representations: plants and animals, figures and objects, extracted from
classical paintings reproduced on decorative vessels. These segments
are arranged in a vertical row of fragmented forms, creating a stratified
system that invites a peek inside. The internal vortex of broken forms and
torn images reflects a scattered, vague thought, in which the fragments
of the 2024 reality try to coalesce into a coherent image.
The work is made of porcelain pressed into a mold, which, due to
its material thinness, barely holds together and is constantly tearing and
collapsing. Only what survives is fired and fixed. The thinness lends the
material transparency, contributing to the fusion and soft transitions
between layers. Light also passes through the layers of material,
generating dreamlike moments. The seriality—a hallmark of Muchawsky
Parnas’ work as a whole—creates a duration of material, observation, and
practical knowledge.

Merav Maroody, who also works as a film and fashion photographer,
created the series Plastic Animals in an attempt to capture the sense of
physical void and distance in her existence as an immigrant currently
living in Berlin, in constant search of an alternative family. Following a
series of traumatic events that necessitated a process of recovery, she
joined a group of friends on a trip to Poland, where she documented the
participants wearing plastic animal masks. The friends, all immigrants
themselves, transformed into a group of hybrid bodies that integrate
into and reflected in the scenery, feeling comfortable behind the masks.
The new family created by Maroody through the masks unfolds
a new mythology of belonging and alienation, since the mask, whose
expression is either emotionless or exaggerated, conceals both danger and
opportunity, like the carnival mask. The photographs in this alternative
family album are not rooted in the domestic space but in nature,
enhancing the experience of alienation. Against fixed perceptions of
the beastly-human binary opposition, Maroody explores the “point of
transformation from victim to monster,” from empathy to aggression.

Multidisciplinary artist Vera Korman explores the interface between
personal and collective memory through the body as a locus of disciplining
and seduction. Omri Alloro’s works examine architectural manifestations
that relate to human interaction, creating interactive spaces that invite
the viewer to take part in the work.
The body of the sculpture, created by Korman and Alloro especially
for the exhibition, is deconstructed as on an assembly line, incorporating
a vibration of synchronized lighting and sound. It is a hybrid body made
of flexible silicone, with a texture somewhere between bare flesh and
clotted jelly. At its center is the smoothie—a programmed mixer of lights,
movement, and sound. The body parts are arranged like exhibits in a
science museum, as if engaging in a symposium of a deconstructed body
with and about itself, in philosophical, psychological, and scientific texts
and sound that processes a New Age meditative discourse of relaxation
and therapy. The complete audiovisual sculpture, with its vibrating
textures and flickering lights, is a deceptive theatrical performance
of fictive triggers—a digital sensual space of artificial desire, blending
an intimate experience of partnership with a sense of terror, anxiety,
and confinement.

Addressing questions of identity and memory and the connection between
man and landscape, Alex Kremer’s paintings are characterized by powerful
expressiveness, vivid colors, and accentuated, dynamic drawing lines,
which enhance the works with the illusion of depth and movement. In
figurative compositions verging on abstraction, the paintings convey
intimacy and solitude. Change is a condition for life, and the images are
in constant transformation of everything human and natural.
Kremer created the works on view about a decade ago, in a drawing
movement of a thin line that spawns an elegiac human figure. One of
the paintings portrays the artist drawing a skull—a typical image that
represents life’s transience in Memento mori (“remember you must die”)
paintings. The poetic inscription Anatomy of the Heart, hangs above it,
capturing the ephemerality and fragility of the soul, the body, and the
work of art.

The series of photographs Impression (Rodin Museum) was created using
a unique technique developed by Yana Rotner working with a 16mm film
camera, extracting individual frames from raw material she filmed and
printing them on paper. In this practice, Rotner proposes a different
observation of what memory did not have time to record.
The contemporary photographer’s gaze thus initiates a dialogue
between the process introduced by the Impressionists in the mid-19th
century, in an attempt to capture the fleeting moment, and the significant
impact of photographic innovations on the development of painting; and
between these and the groundbreaking work of Auguste Rodin, whose
sculptures explore the movement of the human body and its expression,
as a whole and as a fragment. The gaze in her works is both a pause and
a variation on observation, on the perception of the human.

Multidisciplinary artist Yuval Shaul combines traditional and industrial
materials with readymades to construct spectacular hybrids. A central
motif in his work, which blends the organic and the artificial, is a hybrid
human-beast. His self-portrait frequently appears in his works, which
explore themes of masculinity, power, violence, and compassion. The
sculpture on view was originally a realistic sculpture created with a 3D
printer: a life-sized image of the artist carrying a duplicated image of
himself—a wounded figure, or one requiring support. In the exhibition, the
sculpture is presented in a deconstructed version, its parts scattered on
the floor as relics of past splendor or pretentious perfection, reminiscent
of the fragments of the monumental statue of Emperor Constantine in
Rome. It may have collapsed, no longer able to support itself.

Yoav Shavit’s installation Infrastructure Problems originated in a
malfunction in a construction site—the moment of a pipe explosion which
was frozen in time, with the shape of the objects representing their mode
of formation. A primal form that burst from a pipe as a result of heat and
pressure becomes a “pregnant” mold that envelops another, which in turn
emerges therefrom, and so on. The results are biomechanical creatures,
amusing and even absurd to a certain extent, which oscillate between
figuration and abstraction in a quasi-ritual space on a bed of quarry sand
used in building sites.
The interrelations between the fragments of chaotic formations,
in the pursuit of precision and aesthetic satisfaction in the complete
product, are revealed as a destructive struggle. The artist’s voice emanates
from one of the sculptures, posing— in what sounds like a prayer, a
lamentation, or perhaps a chant— one of the fundamental philosophical
questions introduced by philosopher Emmanuel Kant: “What am I
allowed to hope for?” The sound work infuses an apocalyptic atmosphere
with sober observation. The aestheticization of magical forces spins
a contemporary, secular cult from a cluster of organic, synthetic, and
technological materials.

In his extensive oeuvre, which has left a lasting mark on Israeli art, Igael
Tumarkin incorporated the influences of Dada and Pop Art in sculptural
and assemblage techniques that combine ironwork and readymades.
His expressive formal language has consistently conveyed a fierce,
biting protest, engaging in constant dialogue with both local and
European culture and politics. Tumarkin created dozens of sculptures
and monuments installed throughout Israel, alongside prolific work in
painting, drawing, and printmaking, theater set design, personal and
theoretical writing.
For Tumarkin, the body is a battlefield, bringing together the
conflicts and myths of Western history and Israeli reality. Through the
human-sculptural body, he explores the imprints left by time on the
concepts of art, culture, and identity, navigating the space between
paganism and capitalism. In the works presented in the exhibition, the
heads of Renaissance artists and architects Filippo Brunelleschi and
Michelangelo Buonarroti are cast in iron, seemingly impaled on high
pedestals, like medieval machines made from folded metal vessels, from
which obscure implements—either instruments of torture or eternal
totems—are suspended.