The Missing Ficus Gate 2025
The Disappearing Ficus. It is an image of a ficus gate standard in old construction in housing estates of the 1950s in Israel, and is considered an initiative of the building's tenants. Its architectural influence originated from Europe, where such gates were commonly found in gardens and doorways. The ficus gate symbolizes much of the Israeli trauma for me. It is like dried flowers in an expensive vase, like masking tape on a broken window. It contains within it a Thomas nostalgia for the rolling childhoods of all of us.
Because it has not yet helped us, it bequeaths its touch to each generation. The thought of an image that provides nostalgia for before makes me delve deeper into the experience of Israeli trauma. The ficus is pruned as an entrance/exit gate and thinks of itself as providing protection, but everything functions as a liminal space between the inside and the outside. Like a portal that stands under does not protect you, but makes you feel safe. The ficus can come in several forms, either with dense leaves that manage to convince you that you are protected under it, or it is sparse, bare, and dry, reminding you that in the end, you are alone under a rickety bush that has no practical use except as an urban decoration, for which even the city takes no responsibility. The ficus gate is burned as part of the default landscape, devoid of controversy. Only occasionally does someone raise their head above the water to notice it and its bizarreness, its lack of social conformity, are easy to spot. It grew out of us like an architectural invader. The dimensions of the gate are not exact and are slightly smaller than the original. This is because the design of the sculpture was intended to contain the missing part of a child's body. The work is called The Disappearing Ficus Gate because there was no ficus gate in my childhood home; its disadvantage is felt on the skin to this day.
Paper Paper 2024
The work Paper Paper deals with rhetoric. The choice to print the name of the material on the material itself is a radical choice to burden the material. I examine the chances of success of a material taking on physical form through its calling by its name. I may be trying to arouse self-awareness in it and make it rise from the ground so that I can look at it from all sides, as if I am trying to check if the word will recognize itself. After I have neutralized the material, I perform a provocation on it and let the name of the image rest in another body/another font. The semantics that body and body are so close are understandable to me through this provocation. The way in which a word changes its tone in the world through the font connects to matters of rhetoric for me - when rhetoric, when the tone changes, the word and its interpretation change. These heavy and negative relations between rhetoric and semantics, the gap between them, fascinates me not because it is dichotomous but because it is intertwined, and this arouses in me the need to explore the place where a word sounds as if it is accurate, but it misses the mark, when language can no longer hold what you are trying to say.
The giant print of the two words “same” calls out a vital matter to be addressed, like a silent screaming memo demanding immediate attention. The printing of the word “paper” on paper is not a game; it is a desperate plea to make something acutely apparent.
Ghost Studio 2025
Ghost Studio is a work that was born from an attempt to preserve a space in which I no longer work, my old studio, and to examine what remains of it when my body is not present, and when memory is translated into technology. I scanned the studio in 3D, a process through which an accurate representation of the proportions and physical structure was obtained, but then, in a digital processing process, I chose to remove the entire layer of texture, color, ceilings, and marks left by time. What remains is a gray, seemingly sterile relief of a place that was alive and became flat, almost ghostly.
What interested me was not only the original space, but rather the new material created by copying a kind of architectural shell devoid of context, a fragment of space that became a surface. This is not a nostalgic restoration but a transformation: a process in which the space loses its original materiality and acquires a new, weightless, almost abstract, but also highly charged materiality. It is a kind of ghost material: it is born from absence, but it has its own presence.
Through this work, I examine how a technology aimed at precision, like 3D scanning, can give rise to fracture, lack, and poetry. Where is the line between documentation and loss, and what new truth can arise from a residue so pure that it almost forgets for whom it was created?