Selected films by Yehudit Sasportas Created between 2008-2015
The Lightworkers film, Exhibition view, Hasipur (The Story),
Solo Exhibition, Herbert Gerisch-Stiftung, Neumünster, Germany, 2010
Yehudit's most recent exhibition, Seven Winters, held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2013, dealt with the exposure of a complex subconscious structure existing deep underground, with the exhibition space serving as a doorway leading there, making it possible to unearth unprocessed data and bring it to the surface. The exhibition space and its location in Jerusalem are paramount in this respect; poetically, it served as a bridge to a metaphysical dimension, functioning as a key point and permanent platform for the transformation of thoughts, forms and objects from one dimension to another.
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The film Vortex of Separation was screened at the center of the exhibition. It opens with a journey through the museum itself. The entire exhibition space and the sculptures displayed therein were constructed in minute detail by means of a threedimensional program, according to their measurements in the real display area. It shows a 16-minutes' journey during which the viewer descends into the depths of the collective subconscious, portrayed in the film as a wide underground field. In a metaphoric sense, the film acts as a complex architectural tool that represents the structure of the consciousness and acts as a means towards its expansion. The viewer's eye moves like a ghost in the architectural expanse of the exhibition, roaming over every detail of the displayed sculptures; since the motion is physically unrestricted, it approaches the sculptures from different angles, permeating the subconscious of every object and animating it in a unique manner. Thus, the film functions as an extension of the act of sculpting. The camera descends and travels through the floors of the museum and ascends to areas likened to an open, infinite cosmos. Simultaneously, it descends to a deep underground depth, ancient and distant, that opens to a field of endless barrels of oil. The field contains matter represented in ink (the medium from which the drawings are made). The matter, while abstract and not visible, is nevertheless essential, and constitutes an integral part of the visible structure of the gallery. The main movement in the film deals with the rise and slow distribution of unprocessed subconscious matter that gradually reaches ground level and permeates the exhibition's structure itself.
Nighttime photographs of the magnetic table/model, taken from the Berlin studio ceiling over the course of seven years. The Magnetic Shaky Table is a simple still-life scene that represents a collective subconscious that is constantly on the move. Sasportas's philosophical interest originates in the swamp in north-west Germany, where she took various materials from and dried them in her studio, creating part of a conceptual still life that moved constantly, halted only due to an active magnetic field caused by inserted magnets.
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The film shows the dynamics of the components: magnetic stones, dried tree parts from the swamp with inserted magnets, electrified branches with wires wrapped around them, and felt ropes that function as drawing lines.
In Sasportas' work, the swamp embodies an unprocessed part of nature, partly rejected, which has not undergone cultural integration; on the other hand, it constitutes an entrance gate to the metaphysical dimension. The movement of these two spaces - the physical and the metaphysical - form one of the main topics of Sasportas's work.
Installation View from
Hasipur, solo exhibition
Herbert Gerisch Stiftung, Neuemunster, Germany, 2010
Two films played simultaneously projected onto a matte gray surface as part of an installation with sound. The Lightworkers consists of 16 different parts of swamp clearings and forests, totaling more than 150 drawings that were merged into a single underwater floating landscape that is caught between two worlds.
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The film deals with the act of searching, waiting and the act of opening holes or cracks in a given living space. It shows a beam of flashlight aimed at the forest that comes from an unidentified external source. The drawn landscape becomes a reflection of itself, slowly exposing the absence of the foundation which nurtures the forest. The forest body turns into a landscape line moving and imprisoned between one dimension and another. The constant movement between different time zones exposes subconscious materials which have not undergone full integration. It often serves as an interface or meeting point between the invisible but perceived subconscious space and the physical sphere, which in turn echoes their effect.
The Moon was filmed in Berlin over the course of a year during full moon nights, showing its reflection in the water. It was made in Berlin and edited in the artist's studio, where she slowed down the movement of the water, so that it almost resembled a drawing.
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The film creates a link to the round shape of the artist's work table in the studio and sets a parallel to the eye which reflects the daily "sketches" of human activity. The moon as an extension of the pupil is part of the zoom-in and zoom-out mechanism - a kind of "eye-moon" reflecting itself. Sasportas also perceives a connection to cataract spots in the human eye, symbolizing the identity resulting from all moments of resistance to the flow of life itself. The film represents the subconscious sphere - enigmatic and instinctive in its very essence.
GHARDY local voices installation consists of six hand-drawn landscapes, each representing a different physical and mental view which evolves in the course of the film. A horizontal water line in the middle of the screen divides most landscapes in the film into lower and upper scenery, separating the water from the sky and the subconscious from the conscious.
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There is movement in the lower half of each drawing. A subterranean light bubble seeks, little by little, to wend its way out of the territory of the hole in the bottom of the drawing. The bubble's motion sets off a flow of waves carrying light from the lower to the upper half of the image. Light moves up from the abyss of the earth to the surface. The light bubble represents a clearer consciousness which strives to light up unprocessed matter lying at the bottom of the image. In each drawing, there is a different movement and a different rhythm to the light's flow upwards. As the light bubble moves from one subconscious space to another, a black bar accompanies or follows it. Gliding from screen to screen they generate a continuous motion through the whole room. A special sound, composed specifically for this project by the artist Yehudit Sasportas' brother, completes the installation. The six screens interact as parts of one single work. The name GHARDY represents the initials of the names of the artist's
brothers and sisters. This work continues Sasportas's long-term occupation with her nuclear family as a subjective and personal starting point, transported in code into the public domain. By means of anonymous neutralizing tools, presented to the viewer as panoramic fragments of landscape/mental maps, she conveys the consciousness maps of each brother and sister, exposing elements which had not undergone natural integration, remaining unsolved and unsynchronized.
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