Between Matter and Image
- Inbal Cohen Hamo
- Nov 20, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 31
The exhibition In Our Image brings together five artists who draw inspiration from ancient practices, rituals, and ceremonies, incorporating their own image and body into their creative process. The works in the exhibition explore the meaning of being created “in the image,” and how we, as creators, imprint our own “image” onto our work.
Following is a conversation between curator Michal Hasson Glizer and the participating artists.
Michal Hasson Glizer: Hello Anna, Shahar, Sharon, Talia, and Eram.
Let’s start by talking about the works you’re presenting in the exhibition—what have you created?
Anna Fromchenko: I’m presenting seven epoxy cast sculptures made from abandoned beehives, along with a relief work of a hive face made from epoxy. I call the casts ghost hives because they reveal the remaining traces of the bees, long after the bees have died.
Sharon Leshem Morad: All of my works are made of doughת, female figurines sculpted from sourdough bread, a pile of identical figures that have decayed and disintegrated over time, baking papers imprinted with the marks left by the baked sculptures, and three video pieces that explore the creation and shaping of challah dough.
Shahar Sivan: I’m presenting several works. The trio of drawings are part of an exercise I did with models in 2006–7. There are over 200 works done in this technique—a carbon copy sheet placed on B4 paper (an old size I found in a vintage store in the lower city). I draw on the carbon using tools that leave no visible marks, so the drawing is done “blindly.”
Anuga is a work that, in many ways, anticipated similar pieces from 2021–23. It’s a free portrait of a female head, carved with a disc and scorched with fire, wrapped in melted wax—like a mummified figure or a portrait of the dead (Fayum portrait). I’m moved by discovering connections across time within my own body of work.
Zan is a sketch on a wooden board I found and kept in the studio for the right moment. Zan is a friend and model. A gentle and beautiful person. In 2017, I tried to create a large sculpture with him (which turned out to be a complete failure). During the process, I carved this sketch, which is actually my favorite pose: a simple upright stance with arms resting by the sides. The work was stored for several years at RawArt Gallery and returned to me about six months ago. I found it directly related to my current work and “renovated” it.
Alongside these, at the center of the space are the sculptures created over the past year—human figures and heads. They do not perform an action. They are presences seeking encounter. They sense each other and search for closeness.
Eram Aghbarih: I am presenting two paintings in the exhibition. The first is Tears and the second is titled Two Hearts.
The paintings I create pass through the body. Painting is my performative act, expressed through deep inhalation and exhalation. I use unconventional materials for painting, such as liquid soap — I mix the soap with acrylic paint and water. Instead of a brush, I use a drinking straw. I sit next to the canvas, mix the materials in a bucket, and then blow air through the straw into the bucket. This creates monochromatic bubbles that rise up and spill over the surface of the canvas. The stain gradually absorbs with an inner motion and forms its own borders. It requires time, then recedes into itself and gains strength.
Painting, for me, is a tool for deep personal connection between my inner emotions and the outer reality. Through it, I manage to create a personal language that speaks in a unique way about emotional experiences that I try — and often fail — to express in words.
Talia Sivan: The work Hermaphroditus combines stop-motion animation with the clay sculpture that was used to create the animation. The sculpture remained broken and fragmented after undergoing a long process of movement, transformation, and distortion during filming. From frame to frame (12 frames per second of the film), it cracked, dried, some parts fell off while others were added, until eventually it retained only a kind of shadow of the movement it had performed.
Once the sculpture reached the final movement I wanted, I hollowed it out and dried it, then fired it so that it essentially froze in that state.
Michal Hasson Glizer: Can you each share your perspective on what the exhibition In Our Image is about?
Sharon Leshem Morad: I choose my words carefully so as not to sound pompous, but I think all of our works deal, in one way or another, with the cycle of life and its disintegration. Since dough is an organic material and its derivatives are perishable, the cycle is very clear in my work. The sourdough women lying on the table will, at some point, come to the end of their lives and crumble, joining their sisters in the pile in the corner of the room. Like all of us…
Michal Hasson Glizer: What connects you and your work to the other works in the exhibition?
Sharon Leshem Morad: From my perspective, all the works exist on the perishable continuum. Especially Talia’s sculpture, which sheds as it progresses, but also Shahar’s wooden sculptures, some of which are burned. Eram’s and Anna’s works freeze an organic process and preserve it.
Michal Hasson Glizer: Is this a theme that occupies you in your practice?
Sharon Leshem Morad: Yes, always, even if not directly. It’s not hard to guess that my representations deal with myself. The connection between me as a child and me aging, my parents deteriorating before my eyes, and the future disintegration of my own self. Apparently, morbidity is my middle name.
Shahar Sivan: I’ll start here with the material, the physical layer first: I work with organic material, material that was once alive. Material that absorbed decades of life—sun and rain, wind, heat and cold. Microorganisms lived on it and within it. Trees are bones. In that sense, there’s something magical about working with such materials, saturated with energy and continuing on. They shift spatial patterns.
I work with fragmented images (though they realistically match the way I “see” human beings, I know people don’t actually look like that), or more accurately, images in a dynamic process of disintegration and reassembly. This applies to the material itself, which sometimes literally breaks and crumbles, and to the connection between the viewer’s observing eye and the convergence of the image into something defined. My work is done without a clear plan or goal. The process is a path that sometimes has no end (there are a few works in the exhibition that I’m not sure I’ve finished).
My connection to abstract expressionism—action painting—lies at this point: the work is the sum of all the actions performed on it. I’m endlessly curious about the question of encounter and intimacy. What is the size of the “bubble” each of us carries around that defines our private space? That’s why I also play with complex installations in every
action and work in the exhibition, i find a connection between all of usThe wheat that becomes dough, rises, and turns into a symbol of the human spirit—then decays into a pile of bodies, stitched back together in Sharon’s works.
The light that pulses through the hive, revealing the dirt and the uniqueness of what remains, while also drawing attention to the beauty of the simple structure. Anna’s human gesture—arranging nature into boxes and squares, or in this case, “squaring the hexagon.”
The rings of black ink, the depiction of cracks and the randomness of material in Eram’s paintings. Something clearly happened here, though it is unclear what. It is evident that there was once water, like cracked mud in desert basins. Something happened. Someone did something. Someone tried to say something. I feel time in Eram’s work and deep sadness.
Talia sculpts the way I wish I could sculpt but cannot. A sculpture that builds and falls apart at the same time. Like a person shedding parts of themselves while growing new ones. Maybe a kind of Prometheus. But mainly the simple beauty of things that survive anyway. Even though they have both breasts and a penis. Even though they are broken in many places. Despite everything—it lives.
Michal Hasson Glizer: Do you see a connection between loss of control and randomness and the divine act of creation?
Shahar Sivan: I find it hard to trust myself when I work in a planned way on the sculptures themselves. But I do carefully plan the environment of the work and the energy I bring into it—I build the rules of the game. Inside that framework, losing control connects me to something broader, something beyond what I can plan or imagine. It connects me to myself, shaped by all the circumstances that made me who I am.
Michal Hasson Glizer: How does the exhibition’s title, In Our Image, relate to your approach?
Shahar Sivan: Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Honestly, I was disappointed to learn that the verse is about God giving humans control over all life in the sea and on land. That kind of annoys me 🤦🏻♂️.
But still—what does in our likeness mean? Why does He speak in the plural? And what is this image we supposedly resemble?
Michal Hasson Glizer: Some say He is consulting with angels, or with all the creatures and plants created before—so humans are made in the image of all creation. There really is a question: what is image, and what is likeness? What is material, dust, and what is spirit? It is also a question about art—is it material or spirit?
Talia Sivan: About organic material (and the unavoidable connection between body and decay)—I think sculpting with something that decays is really funny and absurd—and we all do it (either because the material is temporary, like dough, or the technique is temporary, like performance).
It is absurd because sculpture was once meant to preserve and immortalize something alive. To turn people or gods into stone so they would not die or be forgotten. But we are doing the opposite—trying to capture something living so faithfully that it becomes alive, and therefore it must also die.
In Anna’s work I see more preservation (because the polyester preserves something that was about to decay), but she cast the hive after the bees had left and people had already declared it finished. So she is preserving something already discarded, already gone. I think that is beautiful.
For me, the exhibition is a chance to show a work that does not provide what art is traditionally expected to offer—eternity or timelessness. And it is freeing and joyful to feel that the work is part of a group that has let go of that kind of pride in favor of another—creating something alive :)
Anna Fromchenko: I would say that you, Michal, as curator, managed to bring together several practices and worlds into one fabric that works and communicates between all of them—the spiritual wood carvings of Shahar with the airborne clay of Talia, the airy color bubbles of Eram with the ghostly wing imprints of my hives, ending in Sharon’s primary material, sourdough, which will never run out… The metaphysics of air, spirit, and matter runs through the whole exhibition in the intelligent way you shaped the relationships between the objects and the space.
Michal Hasson Glizer: Thank you all for this fascinating conversation.
Eram Aghbarih, Sharon Leshem Morad, Talia Sivan, Shahar Sivan, Anna Fromchenko
Curator: Michal Hasson Glizer
Binyamin Gallery
14.11.24 to 7.12.24
On 7.12.24, there will be a gallery talk and closing performance by Eram
*Installation photos courtesy of Michal Hasson Glazer and Shahar Sivan. Artwork images courtesy of the artists (unless otherwise noted).
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