On the Movement Between Existing Text and New Creation

The term text originates from the Latin word textum, meaning woven fabric, presenting writing as the craft of weaving words to create meaning. Many works of art develop through engagement with and/or dialogue with written texts. The exhibition See Entry (עיין ערך) likewise grew around this affinity, tracing the shifts of the artist and their creation from and toward an already existing text. The semantics common in spoken language attribute a weighty significance to textual sources — to anchor a thesis, to lean on a text, to base oneself on evidence. These imply that a reference point is meant to provide stability, a quality still lacking in an emerging idea, thus requiring support as a foundation.

The dynamic that develops while working with text takes place in a space between the already woven and the still-weaving. Seemingly in opposing but actually complementary directions: inward and outward — to move away from the text, one must first delve deep into it. Upward and downward — to anchor the idea in order to then rise beyond it. Forward and backward — to venture into new realms while remembering the point of origin. This creates an interesting relationship between the freedom to treat the reference as one’s own and the responsibility for accurate contextual interpretation. A relationship tied to tension, to the apparent contrast between creation and preparation for creation.

The situation in which the artist finds themselves — influenced by external, prior sources — can be likened to various metaphors of a dam: a storing dam symbolizes a state of study, immersion within a defined territory of personal space; a redirecting dam represents a conceptual turn, a path of creative fertilization born from engagement with the text; an overflowing dam is the danger of over-brooding, of exceeding capacity, and thereby losing personal expression. The poet Ezra Pound wrote of his attempts to compose haiku: “The one-image poem is a kind of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. […] In such a poem, you are trying to report the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms or leaps into a thing inward and subjective.”[1]

The exhibition presents various ways in which this transformation or leap of the external thing, here the textual source, occurs into the internal thing, the personal meaning the artist expresses through their vision. The works in the exhibition are a kind of super-position: an artistic idea laid upon another’s formulation, brought anew into the gallery space.

Assaf Elboher / ChibaText / 2012 / Video / 5 min, loop

Assaf Elboher’s work traces the experience of reading itself. An indistinct blur and a focused diagonal of paws. The body’s movements in the video momentarily awaken the viewer too, like a sentence breaking through a vacant gaze at the pages of an article. Here the text gains a living status, embodied by the dream of an animal often associated with mystery and egocentricity. Through editing and sound manipulations, the filmed and recorded material is presented cyclically, an ultimately futile attempt to create a text.

Elboher’s camera observes from the side but remains barred from accessing the thing itself. It tries to approach the inaccessible, to transcribe. The fur’s soft rising and falling breath remains oblivious to the artist’s search, and thus does not yield, nor even bother to tempt the viewer. This is an attempt to describe — through language, an arbitrary system of conventions — a private experience imprisoned in another. An attempt doomed to failure, and this failure is precisely what the work strives toward. The sound of the dream-watching resembles an underwater murmur — this pleasant float within the unintelligible gradually draws the viewer deeper into an opportunity-seeking experience. And it becomes clear that there is no content behind the story, only empty shells of possible words.

Keren Geller / Hava Nagila / 2010 / Video installation / 6 min, loop

Keren Geller’s video work presents the song Hava Nagila, sung by the men of an Argentinian family, from the youngest to the eldest. The words are pronounced with a heavy, rolling accent — sometimes bold and confident, sometimes shy and hurried — with various distortions. The original Hebrew undergoes different substitutions, some recurring within the family, others unique. These distortions raise the question: do the singers actually understand the words and their meaning? Yet it’s clear that the singing touches their hearts and its joy is infectious. Perhaps the meaning is conveyed more through music than words, or through the way the text is delivered.

The work points to how texts transform — often losing their link to the source of their writing — yet preserving markers of belonging, whether to a place or group. The family members wished to express their belonging through song, but Geller reveals this belonging as distant. She marks representations of their different culture: the singers are filmed against wooden paneling typical of their home, and the entire video is framed in an ornate border, like a painting hanging in a Buenos Aires living room. The very distance between the Hava Nagila in this work and the original sharpens the attention. With humor and humanity, the piece fractures the uniformity of personal-collective memory, highlighting the disintegration of an iconic chorus.

Dafna Westerman / Sixteen Pockets (after Molloy) / 2012 / Concrete and paint

Dafna Westerman offers a solution to the problem faced by Molloy, the eccentric and distracted character in Samuel Beckett’s story of the same name.[3] Molloy’s preoccupation with trying to suck sixteen stones, one after the other, from his four pockets unfolds across six pages.[4] Ultimately, he gives up, tosses the stones, and keeps one — which he presumably soon loses. Westerman returns to this tangle and enables satisfaction of the primary need. She evenly distributes the placement of the stones: a hollow for each one. Numbered, symmetrical, orderly. Stabilized in leveled concrete. She grants the troubled Molloy the security he lacked — the sixteen pockets he so desired, for only through them could he be sure not to suck a stone twice. “A pocket for each stone, and a stone for each pocket.”[5] A respectable, solid solution.[6]

This work enables obsession. The renewed engagement with things — as perhaps with Beckett’s writing itself — affirms the legitimacy of Molloy’s occupation. Beyond the concreteness, it confirms and validates the existence of madness. It makes space for stones in pockets and for anything else we might wish to obsessively devote our thoughts to.

Shira Tabachnik / Works from the series Motl al Saf (On the Verge) / 2009-2011 / Pigment ink print

The photographic series by Shira Tabachnik was shot shortly after she read Yoel Hoffmann’s book Moods[7]. These moods — expressions and sensitivities — opened a new perspective for her. Like a tourist, the book’s written words sent her out into the world to look, to see what occurs, stands, or lies there.[8] Often the locals, in their habitual gaze, overlook what crosses their path. Her mental observations led her to new places, and she embraced them. What floats, floats indeed.[9]

Without attempting to transcribe what exists, to document the written within and without, but rather to let things settle and then resurface. To give space for the being that emerges from the pages to appear in the form of other places. Places that, on one side, connect to Hoffmann’s view, and on the other, to Tabachnik’s world. Images, by being so open, become opaque. And conversely — the more opaque they are, the more open they become to the viewer. The content squares reveal themselves, mostly washed in uniform, unaccentuated light. Framed by familiar squared corners, they stress that what we’re seeing was worthy of remembrance. Words and sentences become anchors.

Asaf Evron / Untitled (The Visual Pyramid after Alberti) / 2012 / Pigment ink print

Asaf Evron’s photographs follow the theory of Leon Battista Alberti[10], who formulated the principles of perspective during the Renaissance. Using contemporary technology — an infrared camera and Kinect sensor[11] — Evron roams his studio space seeking invisible light rays, the sides of the triangle in Alberti’s visual pyramid. This is essentially a photograph of the theory itself, as though it were an illustrative diagram between the paragraphs of an essay. Yet the technical act gains its final validation in the test of aesthetics. The practical engagement is with measurements and positions, while the chosen perspective faithfully serves the visual stimulus.

The structured formalism of the architectural walls is materialized before us, dotted and ovalized. The technical mediators strip away external “subject” mediation, highlighting instead a detachment from continuous vision. There is a medium-based distance — a painters’ theory now reliant on photographic proof. And it is doubtful whether Alberti intended this when he wrote: “Things we cannot see […] are of no concern to the painter.”[12] Yet these photographs undeniably demonstrate the technical phenomena and the interest Alberti expressed. Evron’s immersion in perspective theory has brought forth this present visuality — a visuality without which, perhaps, the theory could never have been written in the first place.

Translated by chatgpt