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FILMS Yehudit Sasportas

Sasportas Films

Films Yehudit Sasportas

Villa Wachholtz

Villa Wachholtz, 2010

Site-specific film including sound

Single-channel projection

Format: HD

10-minute loop

14 15

Vertigo – Arabesques on the Way to the Depths

Yehudit Sasportas is a master of depicting transitions: above / below, down / up, the conscious / the unconscious. The indefinable moments of “not yet” or “just barely no longer”, border regions of transfor-mation, the hybrid spaces between societal reality and the individual unconscious are at the center of her artistic work.As focused as her substantive thematic research

is, that is how diverse her technical approach is thereby. Starting from sculptures and site-specific installations in which she integrated black-and- white drawings and paintings, she developed her very individual artistic vocabulary and evolved the cine-matic and computer-animated media for herself. In a unique synthesis, Yehudit Sasportas brings together land scape perception, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, conceptual penetration and experi-mental image production, for example using magnet pictures created in her studio in something like a natural scientific experimental setup; these pictures are also the basis of her films. Her pictorial world thereby remains thoroughly characterized by the black-and-white linearity of forest and moor land-scapes. Like invisible skeletons, black verticals that peel themselves out of tree trunks pierce the horizon-tality of the swampy ground. Iridescent between concrete form and nature abstraction, they become the emblem of a constructive connection between the visible landscape and the vaguely imaginable underworld: mental landscapes as topographies of the human psyche. 1

For Sasportas, the moor and the forest clearing have long been the ideal grounds for a journey into the unconscious; now a stronger architectural aspect has joined them. On the occasion of her exhibition at the Gerisch Foundation in Neumünster, she seeks to get to the bottom of the “soul” – as she calls it – of Neumünster’s more than 100-year-old exhibition building, Villa Wachholtz. The architecture and its history are the starting point for her film Villa Wachholtz. The beginning cross-fading of radiant brightness peels away – like the moment of awakening from sleep – in a peculiarly immaterial-appearing animation to reveal the building, skeletonized to its inner construction. It rests on a foundation leading endlessly into the depths, a foundation opened up solely by an equally endlessly extended flight of stairs.

But despite all the building’s singularity, it is integrated in the kind of coordinate system that is typical of Sasportas. It doesn’t take long before vertical lines push their way from above into the picture, like a seismogram: a constant pull into the depths, which contrasts with the horizontality of the floor of the portrayed exhibition building. As the building is approached, perception of it also grows more con-crete; the nebulous white of the surrounding space is shifted into solid black. At the same time, to explore the horizontal level, concentric circular lines become visible, seeming to continue without limit into the exterior space. The building as starting point and broadcaster of these wave lines? Or as a materialized concentration of vibrations flowing through the room? Now the furnishings also become visible. While the almost dissolved walls are transparent, individual pictures, projections, and patterns of lines on the walls and floor offer resistance to the eye. Yehudit Sasportas has integrated her entire exhibition Hasipur – The Story within the cinematic reconstruction of the Villa. Like a ghost for which walls are long since no obstacle, the viewer floats through the rooms – and sees in them precisely the film Villa Wachholtz that is drawing him through the building. The fictional camera work of the com pletely computer-animated film snakes along the concentric circles through the rooms, so that the viewer increasingly loses touch with the ground, finally pulled down into dizzying depths along the central seismographic rod. The seismographic needle, which shows up in both films to record the rapture of the deep – is it able to give her a scientifically secured footing? Under the acoustic influence of the increas-ing pulse, one bids farewell to the concrete exhibition and sinks into the deeper layers of the building, which finally dissolves in an aureole veiled in white, with which the cyclical voyage of discovery begins all over again.The artist describes the Villa Wachholtz as a “time

capsule”, as a box filled with special stories. And indeed, this building in particular has a rich history extending from its builder’s extraordinary Express-ionism collection, through its use as housing for British officers and as a municipal counseling center, to its role as an exhibition center for the Gerisch Foundation today. Inspired by the abundance of this history, Yehudit Sasportas develops a cinematic metaphor of the correspondences between reality and layers of consciousness inscribed in reality by history. Like the second film, The Lightworkers, in which glaring sources of light break through a seemingly

floating forest floor and proclaim the enigmatic existence of forces beneath the surface, Villa Wach-holtz, too, penetrates all limiting walls of the visible. Seen in this way, the work of Yehudit Sasportas can be described as transcendental. It corresponds to the Romantic concept of the connection between the real and the ideal, of the longing for what Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829), in his Philosophical Lectures of 1804 – 1806, called unending abundance in un-ending unity, as a reference to the “Higher, Unending, Hieroglyphic”. 2 Sasportas’ graphic and cinematic patterns of lines are based, on the one hand, on this Romantic tracing of manifold fullness of life and, on the other hand, on doubts about the depictability of a nature that the Romantic era considered total, but that from today’s perspective increasingly turns out to be a cultural construct. Seen in this way, repro-ducing landscape and its technoid substitute go hand in hand in Yehudit Sasportas’ oeuvre. When, as in her film The Lightworkers, she summarizes the tree trunks as vertical lines or dissolves them in the X-ray spotlight, then not in the sense of the classical efforts at abstraction with which 20 th-century Modernism wanted to get to the bottom of things. In the various media of her oeuvre, Yehudit Sasportas develops a contemporary panopticon in which idyllic depictions of nature and their technoid construction inter-penetrate the yearning for the abundance of the unconscious and its deconstruction to the point of grotesqueness. This mixture of spiritual totality and quasi-scientific experimental setup, of chaos and order, of the organic and construction, this “artificially ordered confusion, this charming symmetry of con-tradictions” – Schlegel calls it “arabesque”. 2

Martin Henatsch

1

Cf. Hilke Wagner, Yehudit Sasportas. The Laboratory, Kunstverein

Braunschweig, 2008, p. 20.

2

Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie (1800), quoted after:

Werner Busch. Die Notwendige Arabeske. Wirklichkeitsaneignung und

Stilisierung in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jh., Berlin 1985, p. 44.

3

Friedrich Schlegel, Seine prosaischen Jugendschriften, ed. J. Mino,

Vienna 1906, Vol. 2., p. 375, quoted after: Werner Busch. Die Notwendige

Arabeske. Wirklichkeitsaneignung und Stilisierung in der deutschen

Kunst des 19. Jh., Berlin 1985, p. 45.

The Roof

The Roof, 2010

Film including sound

Format: 4:3

6-minute loop

The Lightworkers

The Lightworkers, 2010

Film installation including sound

Dual-channel projection

Projected onto medium-gray surface

Format: HD

10-minute loop

The Roof

The Roof, 2010


Format: 4:3

6-minute loop

Ghardy Local Voices

GHARDY Local Voices, 2009


Multi-channel projection

6 films projected on matt black surface of 3 adjacent walls in

one room facing each other, masked edges

Format: 4:3

5-minute loop

The Magnetic Hearts Film

The Magnetic Hearts Film, 2008


Dual-channel projection onto two matt black discs (2-meter diameter)

opposite each other, masked edges

Format: 4:3

6-minute loop

The Swamp, screen shot from a video film, Germany, winter 2006

70 7146 4342

44 45

The electric table

Animation film for the electric table model (explosion details), Berlin 2008.

(…)

The works of Yehudit Sasportas are complex and multi-layered, from several perspectives. At first glance, the large-format landscapes captivate with their cool beauty. Yet, at second glance, they create uncertainty. What one supposed to be an idyll in black and white reveals itself as a near-apocalyptic landscape. There are eerie, bizarre natural back - drops – cool forests, bright mountain ranges, gloomy, uncanny swamps. Sometimes they are dead land-scapes, complete with trees that are dead or burned, linked with surreal, dreamlike elements. They are not natural landscapes – that soon becomes clear. Rather, they are alien, artificial, fabricated. They are ruins of a symbolic idyll and an expression of a deep alienation. (…)

Technoid-seeming elements and structures, like engraved concentric circles, and vertical gray lines like dripping rain – reminiscent of barcodes – drive out all romantic feeling. The works make us uneasy; they cannot be grasped; everything about them appears to be hybrid and full of contradictions. 1 The black and white bog- and forest-scapes are dark and light, delicate and heavy, idyllic-utopian and eerily threatening, all at the same time. They are alive and dead. All orientation fails. Duplications, reflec-tions, and simultaneous perspectives – such as distant and close-up views – exist side by side within one painting, robbing us of certainty and creating an oscillating focus. Where do we stand? Inside or outside? What are we getting here – insights or out-looks? And in between, we keep finding puzzling, round or oval empty spaces in the painting – holes. But do they lead to another dimension? Do they reveal or conceal? 2 Illuminations or annihilations? The challenge is not to lose oneself in these depths. Or do we dare to take the plunge?(…)

It is these very opposites – exterior and interior, reason and psyche – that Sasportas brings together in her work, and does so in an antinomian approach to the planned and to the intuitive, and with an aes-thetic that seems both romantic-illusionist and scien - tific-technoid. These contradictions, these dualisms, are what determines the character of Sasportas’ work. The Magnet, present in many of the works as a concentric, target-like, circular symbol – sometimes even engraved into the surface of the painting (thereby becoming a physical part of the work), serves as a metaphor for this dialectic bipolarity (…) In the

installation The Magnetic Hearts Film, the observer finds himself between two poles. Because there, right in the middle of the tension between the extremes, is where a field of energy is created. A film is projected onto the circular poles; the images cannot quite be comprehended; ideas develop out of nothing and disappear into infinity before one can grasp them. The Origin of the Work of Art? With it comes a sound that oscillates between the natural and the artificial and was taken from experiments with frequencies and sound waves. It strengthens the feeling of rhythmic movement, which is also created by the grooved pro-jection background.

from: Hilke Wagner Yehudit Sasportas. The Laboratory Braunschweig 2008

1

In 2002, Sasportas said of her works By the River, which she has called

self-portraits: “In viewing my work one encounters an arche ological

formation, which represents the remains of a former structure: human,

architectural, or mental. At first glance, one identifies general,

anonymous images, just the ‘hard and basic data’. Next one notices that

the structure itself is full of contradictions and lacks visual or syntactical

unity.”, quoted in: Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, “Yehudit Sasportas /

MATRIX 200. By the River”, in: Exh. cat: Yehudit Sasportas. By the River,

Berkeley Art Museum, University of California 2002, p. 108.

2

“Concealment can be a failure or merely a disguise. We never have the

certainty of knowing whether it is one or the other. Concealment

conceals and disguises itself. That says: the open space amid being,

the clearing, is never an unyielding stage with the curtains always open,

upon which the play of being is played out. Rather, the clearing only

happens in the form of this dual concealment. Non-concealment

of being, that is never an existing condition; rather it is an event. Non-

concealment (truth) is neither an attribute of things in the sense of

being, nor one of the sentences.” Translation from: Martin Heidegger,

Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Ditzingen 2005, p. 52.

4646

Walking Through Shadow LandsThe Film Works of Yehudit Sasportas

Marc Gloede

There are more enigmas in the shadow of a man who walks in the sun than in all the religions of the past, present and future. (Giorgio de Chirico, We Metaphysicists.)

To find the image of my heart, Among the shadows or here above. (Hölderlin, Diotima.)

50 51

Entering the Worlds of Shadows

Watching the films of Yehudit Sasportas or exper i-encing her film installations is always like tracing back the roots of film itself, since her works seem to be essentially spinning around two of the earliest aspects that the moving image has always dealt with: on the one hand, the sheer fascination of capturing movements or things happening. This means filming, for example, workers just working (which is com-parable to an iconic film Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory by Lumiére in 1895) or documenting the behavior of monkeys in a cage. Sasportas thereby seems to remind us of the almost “banal” capacities and potentials of film. On the other hand, there is a focus on what could be regarded as the overlooked “material” of film – the play of light and shadows – a dimension that by itself is existential for film and to which Maxim Gorky referred so beautifully, when he wrote: “Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there.” 1 In an interesting way, these statements by Gorky,

written in the early years of cinema, have a dynamic that resonates with the filmic shadow lands of Sasportas, which are made almost one century later. In works like The Lightworkers, Ghardy, or Villa Wachholtz, there are moments when we as observers are thrown into strange, dark, and ghostly worlds as well. Like Gorky, we experience the land of shadows and dark spheres, which in a first approach we sometimes might decode as shady swamps, forests with clearings, or gray landscapes. Yet these settings, these places, disappear while we are watching them. They increasingly escape into a darkness and leave us almost disoriented about where we are or what we can see. It is not that we literally can’t see anything. There are still things and sceneries there that meet the eye – but we have to recognize a development in which the visible worlds become abstract. Undecodeable. Ungraspable.

Coming to our Senses

It is interesting to follow this process of gliding into the ungraspable dark. It seems that the harder we try to see and the more we want to decipher what is presented to us, the more these worlds fall apart and elude our wish to get hold of them. Surprisingly this

doesn’t create an unpleasant situation or a hectic momentum: we are always smoothly transferred, almost guided, into the dark (a fact that is strongly supported by the music, which invites the observers to visually walk into and through this other worlds). In all of Sasportas’ works that deal with this dimension, we are never rushed into this mode of perception. There is never an immediacy or a kind of aggression in this momentum of entering these strange worlds. In a bewildering way, the development feels more like a kind of necessary process: almost like an awaken-ing. This might be because, in these films, the more we lose our ability to decode and optically see, the more we reactivate other strategies to perceive. In doing so, we allow our bodies to literally come back to their senses. We begin to touch, smell, and hear again with a new intensity. And by perceiving the films in this way, we have to realize that the main agency for this process is our body, or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has put it: “My body is the field within which my per ceptive powers are localized.” 2 In other words, experiencing the dark sphere of shadows in the works of Yehudit Sasportas means getting to know some-thing about our own strategies of visual perception and our body in general. It is important to note this complexity in the bodily dimension, since the dark ness and shadow-plays might not only trigger a profound visual moment, but also have an impact on the haptic dimension. Walter Benjamin noted this connection of the senses and pointed out how we intuitively use this potential, especially in moments of crisis, in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. 3 And it is not incidentally that film plays a crucial role for him in this discourse. He writes: “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contem-plation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. (…) Reception in a state of distraction, which is increas-ing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise.” 4

The task that Benjamin is referring to in the early 1930 s is an increasingly growing number of intense moments (shocks) that bring our sensory system to its limits. At this point, our body often can’t use visual strategies alone to deal with the momentum of a crisis. And, following Benjamin, it is often the haptic dimen-sion that offers us ways through this difficulty. Here the

visual is no longer the dominating sense and sepa-rated from the other senses. On the contrary, we discover a certain connectedness of our senses, 5 and it becomes necessary to rethink our understanding of them. In a way, the limits of the mode of thinking and experiencing the world through a divided sensory system are revealed. Furthermore, we have to under-stand how the senses interact. The haptic sense might refer not only to the direct touch of our fingers – we have to acknowledge that our eyes are capable of touching as well. Eighty years after Benjamin’s essay, Sasportas

now seems to have a quite comparable focus, since we can experience this connectedness of the senses in Sasportas’ films – only this time in a completely reversed dynamic: It is the absence of intensity, the absence of the visual, that creates a moment of crisis and shock. Our daily level and frequency of stimuli has increased so much that we perceive moments of less intensity and less orientation as highly confusing. But regardless of which mode is the reason for a crisis in our perception (the frequency of shocks or the shock of an absence of shocks), both modes bring back an awareness of our bodily sensory system. And we have to ask ourselves whether a classical understanding of perception through segmented fields of isolated senses might be helpful in coming to an understanding of these works. If we have to admit that our visceral perception is more to be understood as multi-modal, triggering several senses at the same time, then a distribution of the senses might be right for scientific analysis, but is problematic when seeking to understand a perception of artworks. As Vivian Sobchack has pointed out: “It becomes literally nonsensical to talk of the senses as if they were isolated from their entailment in an intentional structure or from each other, to speak of them as if they were discrete modes of access to the world rather than differentiated modalities of perceptual access to the world. The senses are different openings to the world that cooperate as a unified system of access. The lived-body does not have senses. It is, rather, sensible. It is, from the first, a per ceptive body.” 6

That this idea is also of great importance for Sasportas’ oeuvre becomes clearer the longer we stay in these atmospheres of her films. In the films, this intense focus on the body and

the senses may not be surprising, since the works of Sasportas are made in a period “when theorists describe contemporary American culture as under-

Screen shot from the film Jerusalem-Berlin-Leipzig, video with sound recording of apes voices, 10-minute loop, 2006.

52 53

going a simultaneous and related crises of represen-tation and crisis of the ‘real’.” 7 Here the artistic search for alternative fields to these discourses of crisis seems to lead almost naturally to questions of the body of perception and the perceived phenomena, namely the image and its space.

Unleashing the Power of Shadows into the Image, Space, and Body

If the concepts of representation and the real (espe-cially in an era of the digital image) are in question, it is no wonder that we are radically thrown back toward what is close to ourselves: our own machinery of perception – the body. If the relation of the image to the real world has been cut off, then the dynamics of the filmic worlds, how we approach them, and their relation to the idea of the mimetic dimension must necessarily change completely. If we step away from the mimetic model (since mimesis is no longer the binding concept of the image-world relation), images are no longer bound to certain mindsets or realistic worlds. Accompanying this cut is not only an uncer-tainty about how to conceive of the relation between image, world, and perceiving subject, but also a new freedom in the worlds of the image and the ways we can perceive them. We don’t have to decode or recognize certain spaces anymore, but are invited to fantasize, imagine, and even invent new possible worlds, in relation to what we see. The differentiation between entities like the image, the world, and the self has therefore turned toward a new dynamic in which the formerly separated fields are not opposed, but understood as interwoven. When Yehudit Sasportas traces back aspects that

involve this discussion of the image, the body, and parallel to this discourse an understanding of subjec-tivity (like perception through the senses or sensual phenomena), then this has the potential to re-open questions that other discussions weren’t able to address anymore. And this is precisely the point at which the shadow starts to develop a new meaning and a new strength. It is their blurring structure that knits together the formerly separated worlds. But in contradiction to the filmic experiments of the Expanded Cinema, e.g. Malcolm Le Grice (Horror

by a frontally oriented, seated audience. Instead, it is increasingly necessary to walk through the instal-lations and to enter into the relationship of space, pictorial space, and viewer while in motion. It becomes apparent that this transformation not only is essential for film, but also signifies a gain for thought in the indicated categories of space, pictorial space, and viewer. It is now possible to recognize an interdepen-dency that in the past has not often revealed itself: not only does it appear that space is determined by the gaze of the viewer, but space likewise appears as the determiner of the gaze, and thus exposes what Martin Seel revealed as a constant oscillation between determining and self-determining.11 In this way, filmic space as we experience it in the works of Sasportas nearly becomes an active being that no longer merely reflects what the human spectator casts into it. Instead, space becomes an agens, an agent. 12 Equipping a world that confronts the subject with such potential, however, shakes the foundations of our accustomed modes of thinking. And although this idea is actually connected with the transformation that has developed particularly rapidly in the course of the 20th century, from a thinking in terms of statically absolute spaces and bodies to a thinking in terms of dynamically relational spaces, 13 this idea nevertheless continues to be deeply unsettling. But what more could we ask of images…

Marc Gloede

1

Quoted after: Jay Leyda, Kino. A History of the Russian and the Soviet

Film, London 1972, pp. 407– 409.

2

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs,

Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1964, p. 166.

3

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological

Reproducibility”, (Third Version), in: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings,

Volume 4, 1938 –1940, Cambridge: Belknap Press 2006, pp. 251– 283.

4

Walter Benjamin, ibid.

5

Jonathan Crary wrote about exactly this development of separating and

reconnecting the senses in relation to the impact of new technologies

and everyday experiences in modern society. See: Jonathan Crary,

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19 th

Century, Massachusetts 1992.

Film 2, 1972) or Gill Eatherley (Aperture Sweep, 1973), 8 in which the shadows became part of a play / perfor-mance that reflected the dynamic between screen, architectural space, and performer, in Sasportas’ films the shadows don’t need to be staged by a performer or have to be actively taken away from the screen. They stay on the screen and unfold their strength. From this location they are able to actively collapse a certain construction of space. By developing into abstract worlds, the shadow worlds gain their intensity and potential. They become almost uncontrollable, shifting from an outside of us to an inside and because of this undermining a vision of the rational, autonomous, independent, self-determining person. So if Sasportas with her works fosters specifically these sensual experiences and encourages intensi-ties, she in a way does nothing less then to actively subvert this unity and stable status of the univocal subject of a male discourse. She is letting the intensi-ty, the excess, flow back into the body. This is why the fluidity of the shadows is so important to her: they endanger a separation of world and subject and by being highly subjective they will always create the problem of being ultimately resistant to a rational and objective categorization. This dynamic becomes even more visible in Sasportas’ filmic installations. While experimental film and film criticism often

subject cinema to an apparative analysis, precisely because of its architectural standards and the perception of film that they guide, it seems that an entirely new spatial freedom is being offered in that other space, the museum. In her treatment of an aesthetic of the installation, Juliane Rebentisch demonstrated how, through the break with classic cinema architecture and in connection with the new possibilities of electronic images, the spatial presen-tation format of film could be radically modified. 9 In this way, Rebentisch aligned herself with Gilles Deleuze, who with regard to the electronic image also stressed that the organization of space with the proliferating new format now “(loses) its privileged direction – first and foremost, the privilege of the vertical, to which the projection screen continues to be a testament – in favor of an undirected space, which relentlessly transforms its angles and coordinates and transposes its verticals and horizontals.” 10

The potential of these moving images as we see them in Sasportas’ installations appears everywhere, distributed to projection screens on every wall, on the floor, on the ceiling, and no longer has to be perceived

6

Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film

Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992, p. 77.

7

Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film

Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992, p. XIX.

8

See: Lucy Reynolds, “Magic Tricks? Shadow Play in British Expanded

Cinema”, in: Afterall Journal, London 2010, No. 23.

9

Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation, Frankfurt am Main 2003,

particularly pp. 179 – 207.

10

Gilles Deleuze, Das Zeit-Bild. Kino 2, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 339.

11

Martin Seel, Sich bestimmen lassen, Frankfurt am Main 2002.

12

The question posed by W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want?”, can

be understood as entirely corresponding to this idea of the gazing

space. See: W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves

of Images, Chicago 2005.

13

On the transformation of thought about space, see: Martina Löw,

Raumsoziologie, Frankfurt am Main 2001.

Index of Works



The Roof, 2010


Ghardy Local Voices, 2009

pp. 17, 58

pp. 25, 60

pp. 33, 62

pp. 5, 56

pp. 41, 64

57


Site-specific film including sound

Single-channel projection

Format: HD

10-minute loop

59

The Roof, 2010


Format: 4:3

6-minute loop

6160



Dual-channel projection

Projected onto medium-gray surface

Format: HD

10-minute loop

6362

YehuditAvi Hagit RutiGami Doris

GHARDY Local Voices, 2009


Multi-channel projection

6 films projected on matt black surface of 3 adjacent walls in

one room facing each other, masked edges

Format: 4:3

5-minute loop

64 65



Dual-channel projection onto two matt black discs (2-meter diameter)

opposite each other, masked edges

Format: 4:3

6-minute loop

67

Yehudit Sasportas

(born 1969, Ashdod, Israel) lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv.She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, in 1993 and spent that year studying in the Sculpture Department of the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.Since 1993 Yehudit Sasportas has held a teaching

position in the Bezalel Academy. Since her graduation, Sasportas has been examining the subconscious of objects and exploring unresolved spaces that are yet to be fully-integrated into the object, working in drawing, sculpture, installation, and film.In 1999 she obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree

from Bezalel Academy, in collaboration with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The following year, she held a solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art with her installation The Carpenter and the Seamstress. Referring to the occupation of both her parents, the exhibition was an autobiographical one that saw her begin to develop her unique imagery that integrates pine forests with maps and seismographs of sorts. This imagery was further explored in her solo exhibi-tion By the River at the Berkeley Museum of Art (2002), with an all-encompassing installation of architectural forms consisting of various scaled drawings. By 2007, when Sasportas was chosen to represent

Israel in the 52 nd Venice Biennial, images of swamps and forest clearings had become a recurring theme in her works. Her installation Guardians of the Threshold resembled a topographical view of mystical scenery that touched on personal traumas and certain unfathomable truths. Other solo exhibitions of Yehudit Sasportas include: Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig (2011); Hasipur – The Story, Herbert-Gerisch-Stiftung (2010); Cosmic Rifts, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2009); The Clearing of the Unseen, DA2 Domus Atrium, Salamanca (2009); The Laboratory, Kunstver-ein Braunschweig (2008); The Cave Light, Leonhardi- Museum, Dresden (2005); The Pomegranate Orchard, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2005); Trash-Can Scale, Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod (1996). Yehudit Sasportas has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including in: Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin (2009); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2008); Berlinische Galerie (2007); National Museum, Warsaw (2006); Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2006); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2006); Deutsche Guggen-

heim, Berlin (2005); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2004); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga (2004); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2002); 1 st Valencia Art Biennial, Valencia (2001); Tramway Arts Centre, Glasgow (2001); 6 th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (1999). Yehudit Sasportas has received the following

awards (selection): Chosen Artist Award of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation (2003 – 2005); The Israeli Art Prize, Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1999); Young Artist Award, Israeli Ministry of Culture (1996); the Sharet Scholar-ship and the Helena Rubinstein Award for Sculpture, America-Israel Cultural Foundation (1994 –1998); Ehud Elhanani Prize for Academic Achievements, Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design (1993); Robert Steinmann Prize for Sculpture, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (1993). Yehudit Sasportas is the 2009 recipient of the Israeli Ministry of Culture Award for Excellency in the Arts.

69

Editor: Martin Henatsch and Gerd Harry LybkeDesign and typesetting: Maria Magdalena KoehnText: Marc Gloede, Martin Henatsch, Hilke WagnerTranslation and copy editing: Mitch CohenPrinting: Pögedruck, LeipzigBinding: Buchbinderei Mönch OHG, LeipzigPhoto: Uwe Walter, Berlin

All workscourtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv andGalerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig / Berlin

© for the reproduced works by Yehudit Sasportas, courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig / Berlinwww.eigen-art.com

Thanks to: Martin HenatschBiggi & Herbert GerischGerd Harry LybkeIrit Fine Sommer

Tal Peer, Berlin (Studio coordinator)Katja Anzelewsky, Berlin (3D-imaging, Technical planning, Film editing and compositing)Ulf Werde, Crème, Berlin (Encoding and Blue-ray production) Gamliel Sasportas Studio, Tel Aviv (Sound production) Tamar Zagursky Tamar Margalit Sivan Raveh

Maria Magdalena KoehnAnne SchwanzKerstin WahalaCorinna WolfienGalerie EIGEN + ART

Thomas HueblMy Family

Yehudit Sasportas: Hasipur – The Story Herbert-Gerisch-Stiftung, NeumünsterNovember 6, 2010 — February 20, 2011Curated by Martin Henatsch

Galerie EIGEN + ART LeipzigJanuary 15, 2011 — April 16, 2011

yehudit sasportas - galerie eigen+art · yehudit sasportas is a master of ... solely by an equally...

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