- 2001 Israel, Tel Aviv: Start Art Gallery
- Start Art Gallery [support financial and technical]
Constellation for Awakening
I started the work in 1989 in my studio in Haifa and completed it in Tel-Aviv in 2000, bearing in mind the signs of Urban Traces. After this work, I started to “cover over” old canvases I had painted back in 1988-1992. These depicted the landscape of my urban environment in Haifa, an industrial port-town, such as oil refineries, chimneys, and high-voltage lines. The canvases underwent a dynamic of continuous erasing and discovery. The elements originally represented in the paintings were no longer identifiable. However, their absence was made visible through the traces of erasing and scratching on the canvas. This gave the series its title, which was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress in The Arcanes Project: “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. Awakening.” Over the years, the paintings have been connected to others of my projects, thereby expanding them into the realm of the canvas. For instance, the painting The Eye refers to the documentary film Body Memory in which I recorded the testimony of a young Druze who had lost half his body in a landmine explosion in the Golan Heights. I dedicated most of the movie to his eye—his missing eye. As well, the painting Border Stone originated from the movie Adamot, which deals with the theft of fertile land in the “security zone” between Israel and Lebanon in the nineties. Initially, the border stone marked the territorial border horizontally but it became a vertical measure marking out the depth of the soil transferred from south-Lebanon to Israel. The painting transposed this process of digging onto the materiality of the canvas.
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