Rachel Neiman
May 24, 2013

The Israel Museum this week announced the opening next week of a unique installation created especially for the Museum by Yehudit Sasportas, one of the most prominent Israeli artists working today

Featuring primarily new work, Yehudit Sasportas: Seven Winters displays films alongside large-scale sculptures and drawings.

Sasportas, who lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv, is perhaps best known as the featured artist in the Israeli pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Regularly exhibited in galleries in Europe, the United States and Israel, this is her first solo museum exhibition in over a decade and her first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum.

The curators, Mira Lapidot, Yulla and Jacques Lipchitz, write: “Walking though the installation is like drifting along a stream of consciousness, an associative journey encompassing objects and images, times and places… Visitors entering the installation are transported to an alternative universe of black-and-white forest and marsh landscapes and a visual vacillation between the conscious and the subconscious.”

“Some of the times are personal: a childhood crib that Sasportas created more than 20 years ago…

“…followed by highlights of her work from different periods in her artistic biography, until we reach the timelessness of her more recent evocations of a primordial world.”

“The installation also embraces a geographic expanse, from her father’s carpentry workshop in Ashdod…

“to her own studio in Berlin, from a marshy landscape in northwest Germany…

to an inner landscape of consciousness, memory, and oblivion.”

The installation culminates in the new large-scale film Vortex of Separation (2013), which features floating objects – a piano, oil drums, natural debris – that are part of Sasportas’ visual narrative.
 
Yehudit Sasportas: Seven Winters is on view from May 28 through October 19, 2013.

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