Well-known Israeli artist Ayelet Albenda will showcase the supernatural experience of soldiers in the Gaza war through a series of photographs at the forthcoming United Art Fair. She tells Karan Bhardwaj about her nomadic life, inspiration and films
You are exposed to many cultures while hurtling from one country to the other. Tell us about your upbringing.
I was born in Ohio, into a family of Israelis who had immigrated to US a few years earlier. When I was five, we returned to Israel, to Natania where I grew up.
Natania, located next to the sea, and surrounded by the beautiful green villages of the area, populated by people of different socioeconomic backgrounds living next to each other but at the same time also growing “ghettos” for the immigrants from Ethiopia - seemed to me a normal city. Allowing contradictions to coexist, it never seemed pretentious to me. It taught me a little loneliness, a little violence, a specific connection to nature and I think it taught me to love contradictions. I can assume this is a normal experience of people growing up in a city, and for me I could say it had become one of my basic sources of inspiration, even if only in an abstract fundamental sense.
Then…
At the age of twenty I travelled and lived for a while in New York, where I studied painting at the Art Students league. A short period after returning to Israel, I relocated to Berlin, where I have lived for about nine years. There I studied Fine Arts at the UdK, in a master class of Christiane Moebus. After nine years in Berlin I decided to return to Israel. I moved to Shapira, a neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv, which I feel is very similar to Natania for me, and fills me constantly with peace and confusion.
How did you get into artIJ
I started my journey in art with drawings and paintings. During my university years I opened up to different media — video art, photography, installations. I don’t feel obligated to a certain medium, but rather enjoy the possibility to research and use all media according to the subject I'm focusing on, and also to find the meeting point between them, where different media overlap, resemble or replace each other. Many of my works lately are ready-made, using different materials I find on the Internet.
Is cultural alienation the biggest motivatorIJ
In my work I deal often with nomadism and detachment as a motivation and background for self research and self definition. The constant search of a peer group, a community or an ethos to identify with and belong to, and the cultural alienation that often derives from it. This probably started to motivate me as an immigrant but I have realised these aspects are inherent not only in immigrants but also in other “nomadic” groups — in refugees, in soldiers, in adolescents, all of which try to adapt the formal ideas of their wished community and identify with them in an extreme manner.
What are you going to showcase at the United Art FairIJ
I am going to exhibit a series of not so standard photos. They are actually frozen images out of videos I have found on the web, which I have retouched delicately and blown up. During the 2008 Gaza war (Operation Cast lead) several Israeli soldiers have reported the appearance of Mother Rachel (inside the Gaza stripe), who spoke to them and saved their lives.
The images are taken from interviews with these soldiers describing their moments of epiphany during war. In order to hide their identity a strong light was used, as if it would be projected out of them. I found these images a beautiful expression of the threshold between oneself and a greater narrative, in this case the strong belief in a supernatural experience during war time.
What was your experience of Gaza warIJ
During the Gaza war of 2008 I was still living in Berlin. I experienced it through the news and the phone like many others. The masses of messages, images, sounds, opinions attacking you through the media build and take apart narratives so easily, it is overwhelming and extremely difficult to choose the one to stick to, and I guess even more difficult to let it go and choose another one. I’d rather not say mine, because I don’t think my work deals with the narrative of the war itself, but rather with the soldiers. I am not trying to ask who’s right, or what actually happened there, but rather portrait the emotional state of young soldiers during wartime, far from their parents, looking for a stable ground or a stronger force to belong to and becoming one with it.
Your film From lodging to lodging also touched the subject of nomadicity. Was it inspired from your experienceIJ
It was an experimental film I wrote with Berlin-located artist Imri Kahn and directed a few years ago. It is based on a short story by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, about a person moving between apartments, trying and not being able to feel connected to home. The story takes part in Tel Aviv, but was shot almost entirely in Berlin. The sound was recorded in Tel Aviv, and editing the two together created a laminal world neither here nor there. The film is certainly part of my research of nomadicity and belonging, and is an experiment in deconstruction and reconstruction of the senses in the search of new options.
Your last film Day by Day has given cinematography a new definition. Any reason for cinematic experimentIJ
I keep experimenting in this field — if From lodging to lodging tried to deconstruct the traditional connection between sound and vision, my latest movie Day by Day, which I have just finished shooting it with Israeli director Maya Sarfaty, tries to deconstruct the traditional use of the camera’s expression of a point of view. Here we created a film, which shows at the same time (using a split screen) both the world in front of our main character and the world behind him. Thus detaching the camera from a concept of a point of view, and challenging the viewers, demanding them to choose their point of reference and belonging.
Did you ever come across Indian artIJ
I attended one Indian art exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art last year. It was curated by Tami Katz-Freiman, Rotem Ruff. I could relate to many of the works, which seemed to me as a deconstruction of the traditional, divine, religious ideas through the use of basic, dirty, unholy materials, which impressed me in Sakshi Gupta’s metal scrap carpet or Shilpa Gupta's interactive work which was enchanting as a miracle and amusing at the same time.