"I’ve always inhabited two worlds"
A
Conversation with Yehudit Sasportas
Her drawings look as though
Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape paintings had been converted into
a modern, high-tech form. Lonely stretches of woods, huge dead trees, and
snowy mountain ranges are drawn in precise filigree lines, reflected in
murky waters, or covered in grids that recall the bar codes of product
packaging. At first glance, the works of
Yehudit Sasportas oscillate between nature and architecture, ecological
catastrophe and romantic utopia. Yet in reality, the 36-year-old Israeli
artist is not interested in reproducing nature, but in creating a
topography of the human psyche, an existential investigation of the depths
of the subconscious that affect our perception of reality. Over the past
ten years, Sasportas has developed a sophisticated sign system in which
autobiographical material is crossbred with analytical Minimalist
structures. The results are drawings, paintings, and installations that
function like psychological spaces the viewer can enter into both mentally
and physically. Sasportas is currently creating a work for the
Israeli Pavilion at the 2007 Venice
Biennale. Andrea Scrima visited the artist in her Berlin studio
and talked to her about postmodernism, childhood memories, and hybrid
organisms.
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Yehudit Sasportas
Photo: Yehudit Sasportas
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Andrea Scrima: You
used to travel back and forth frequently between Germany and Israel; these
days you still keep a studio in Tel Aviv, but spend most of your time in
Berlin. Has living here changed the way you make art?
Yehudit Sasportas: The move here was a good decision. Tel Aviv is one
of the most intense places I know. It’s like a car that runs so fast that
it sometimes loses its connection to the ground. Here, I touch down. I can
delve so much more deeply into my work. In Israel, the sun is intense from
the moment it rises, while in Berlin, there’s hardly any light in the
wintertime at all. It’s like two different systems: the light here in
December is amazing. It influences your metabolism, your whole body. This
creates a different kind of energy that can be very conducive to making
art, to contemplation. I find myself investigating some very basic
questions of drawing here. In Israel, the energy is very high due to the
intensity of the light and the structure of everyday life; it casts things
into high relief, and my drawings tend to be more black and white, more
conceptual. In Berlin, I allowed my work to become softer, more
reflective; I’ve noticed the appearance of a whole new spectrum of greys
in the work.
Yehudit Sasportas
"The Ink Rain",
2006
Deutsche Bank Collection
You’re currently working on your contribution to the Israeli Pavilion at the
2007 Venice Biennale. The sculptural and architectural elements are being
built in Israel, while you’re working on the other parts of your
installation here in Berlin. Does this moving back and forth between two
different locations affect the development of the work?
It
forces me to focus on the work in a very particular way. It’s a matter of
keeping all these disparate elements of a single installation connected in
my mind and together on a single page, as it were. But it also allows me
to view things from a multitude of perspectives. It’s a working process
that reflects a basic split in my way of thinking, like a co-existence of
two voices in a single person. And I think that living in two different
places supports this split in a productive way.
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Yehudit Sasportas
"The Shadow's Wall", 2006
courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
When you begin exhibiting widely, you have to travel quite a bit to look
at the spaces you’re working with. But while you’re thinking about your
projects, you’re always somehow anxious to get back to the studio. It
became an almost philosophical question for me: how to remain active on
the international exhibition circuit and still retain the original aura of
the work. Actually, the main part of my work resides in the craft: it’s
manual; everything is handmade. And so when I began working with a 3-D
program to assist me in developing a virtual concept for an exhibition
space, this sudden introduction of technology was amazing. I use the
software as an initial instrument to view my designs from above, to feel
out the basic properties of things. For instance, after I went to see the
pavilion in Venice, we created a 3-D model of the exhibition space on the
computer. Then I started making small models of my artworks that I felt
would be appropriate to the space; these were the outcome of a very
intuitive process.
The Guardians of the Threshold, your
installation for the Israeli Pavilion, consists of a complex arrangement
of sculptures, projections, and paintings mounted onto sliding panels.
These architectural elements enter into a dialogue with the building’s
modernist architecture; at the same time, they suggest a malleability of
basic concepts of space, an inversion of inside and outside, of
continuousness and discontinuousness. Could you explain some of the
concepts behind this work?
The pavilion is a Bauhaus building
from the fifties designed by
Zeev and
Yaacov Rechter, two famous Israeli architects and father and son. There
are three floors in the pavilion; the walls will be painted a deep blue,
creating a dramatic atmosphere that is further enhanced by a sound piece.
The installation’s components interact with the architecture in such a way
as to subvert clear categories of entry and exit, interior and exterior.
On the second floor, for instance, there will be a gate six meters wide
bearing movable doors on wheels; paintings are mounted on sliding panels
that essentially open onto nothing. Adjacent to this is a projection
depicting a window with a landscape outside. It’s a vertical landscape,
like a Caspar David Friedrich painting, but the light isn’t actually
coming from anywhere; it’s an illusion. And this illusion is very
important for the work; the source of this light is another emptiness. The
window projection depicts a swamp in the very early morning, a little
foggy. The image is ambiguous: it could be the first morning after an
ecological catastrophe or war, but it could also be a very beautiful
utopia. My drawings and paintings often deal with two realities existing
simultaneously. Conceptually, it’s like an ellipse; there are two centers
to the work: nature and architecture. Both function as psychological
spaces, structures of the inner self.
Yehudit Sasportas
"Koudin", 2006
Deutsche Bank Collection
It’s like the thin
line between the reflection and the "reality" in the upper part of your
pictures: there’s always this invisible division, as in Koudin,
your diptych from 2006 that was recently acquired for the
Deutsche Bank Collection.
The relationship between the
conscious mind and the subconscious is a major motif in my drawings. I
deal a lot with the roots of things, the unconscious: all the wounds,
hidden feelings, and memories that surface from time to time, like another
reality existing all the while beneath you, another person controlling
your behavior without your knowledge. The unconscious creates a kind of a
filter through which you perceive reality. If you had a constant stain on
your glasses, it would be superimposed everything you’d see – until you
discovered the origin of the stain.
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