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Artist Statement: Action’s Echo

The body of work Action’s Echo is based on photographs of sculptural gestures carried out both in the studio and in varying locations. Each sculptural act is usually documented through dozens of photographs taken from close perspectives. These are subsequently digitally assembled into an image that extends the sculptural act in digital form, while retaining the traces of digital labor. In many works, the act of exhibition display constitutes a third stage of material and objectual intervention. Within this practice, the photographic image becomes one component in a chain of sculptural and bodily acts that reverberate with one another and converge into photographic objects in space.

The making of the works in this exhibition has extended over many years, in all the places where I have lived or stayed, as the photographic workspace has become a site of material and conceptual emergence—one in which the boundaries of action and the relations between space, matter, light, object, documentation, and image are tested.

The studio is at once a fixed place and a dynamic, unsettled working condition, emerging wherever I operate. The practice in this body of work seeks to engage the tension between permanence and transience, between sculptural gesture and mutable materiality, and between sculptural action and its possibilities of inscription through photography, while asking questions of processes of formation, disintegration, transformation, and visual mediation.

Photography is often described as a mechanism that re-organizes our perception of the world, an autonomous system shaping the internal logic of the visual and mental image. In this sense, photography is not merely a technical means but a cognitive template that shapes the limits of visibility and the very possibility of thinking the visual existence. This is a foundational position for me, and in the work of articulating its material reverberation, I see photography as a field of operation where the relations between the material and the visual medium are both constructed and unsettled. Photography ceases to be static documentation and becomes a cultural and political form in which possibilities of suspension, decomposition, and re-composition of material reality unfold—physically, virtually, and in hybrid ways—through actions in matter, in space, in light, with photography, by means of photography, and upon photography.

I am also engaged here with the phenomenological conception of the image, in which the body, even when not directly present, is inscribed in matter and in compositional configurations. The body functions as an intuitive substratum of sensory experience; it is a body among bodies, among objects, enmeshed in the fabric of the world. Things are its extension, and vision is not external to bodies but operates within them. Photography mediates the relation between the perception of the real and the possibility of its absence. Against this backdrop, I am preoccupied with the question of how photography—traditionally replacing the real with its representation—might become a field in which presence and absence coexist in constant tension. The sculptural compositions seek to activate a movement of the visible and the invisible, where the image is not only the product of vision but also a stratified, rhizomatic, incoherent object with an inherent potential for transformation—in time, in space, and as a function of the gaze of a concrete subject.

The tension between the artistic object and its systems of mediation and dissemination also concerns me: the understanding that the very essence of the artwork lies in being a mediated event, whose validity and form always depend on shifting institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. In my works, the photographic image does not replace sculpture but relies on it to generate another arena of appearance and transformation. Photography offers a singular configuration drawn from a multiplicity of possible manifestations. In different installations I allow the images to change between exhibitions or even during the course of an exhibition—to undergo renewed processing or to appear in a different mode of display, re-examining the original act against the shifting context or in relation to the ever-evolving medial, cultural, and political conditions of possibility. Thus, even though photography carries the genius of photographic fixation, I seek to activate it simultaneously as an open, dynamic, and mutable field of action.

The materials I employ are often derived from the places in which I work—materials collected from the immediate environment; frequently processed wood, functioning as a symbolic threshold between nature and culture. I work with drills, zip-ties, adhesive tapes, nails, and screws, in sculptural gestures confronting the boundaries of time and transience. In certain works I seek to establish a conceptual and physical dialogue with the aesthetics of temporary structures such as sukkahs, improvised shelters, or desert sheds, which combine functional improvisation with elemental and/or traditional formal sensibilities. My interest does not lie in reconstructing these practices, but in understanding how material approaches grounded in flexibility and environmental adaptation may expose intuitive and principled sculptural modes of thought. In the studio, the photographic subjects also shape the environment itself: tools, photographic devices, their remnants and hybrids, vegetables, fruits, and more.

Several works in the exhibition dismantle and reassemble monuments through a similar procedure: photographing dozens of frames from close yet non-identical perspectives, and constructing a fractured, shattered, and re-composed image. This engages critically with the indoctrination of collective memory through images and objects—particularly within this genre. The disrupted assemblage of these objects enables their adjustment to the present time and to the context of both the collective space and the private exhibition.

The body of work Action’s Echo is not oriented toward technological developments or their representation. Yet, because of the many years of work upon it, it has repeatedly, if diffusely, intersected with the developmental map of photography. The transition from analog to digital photography, the capacity for visual manipulation, and the emergence of generative imagery—all these are not merely tools but part of the material and cultural language in which the work operates and by which it is operated. It is an attempt to create a dynamic system in which images exist within long-term processes of transformation, responding to technological, cultural, and political developments through change and re-emergence. The sculptural gesture is documented in fragmented, multi-perspectival form to allow a broad range of possible assemblies—among other reasons, to articulate the tension between the burned-in photographic present and dynamic sculptural transience, and between the singular formalist act and the final work that is always woven into the broader political space.