interview

Yehudit Sasportas is an installation artist whose work fuses drawing, painting, sculpture,
and architecture. In 1999 she received the Gottesdiener Prize, awarded annually to the
most accomplished young artist in Israel. The themes of Sasportas's art are both specific
to her own experience living in Israel and almost universally resonant - from the
problematics of defining form, to displacement and the inability to define borders.
Wandering, elusiveness, instability, and concealment; tension, aggression, and lack of
control are subjects addressed in her work.

The following is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between MATRIX Curator Heidi
Zuckerman Jacobson and the artist on August 19, 2002.

HZJ: You have mentioned that in your 2000-2001 installation The Carpenter and the
Seamstress two separate identities - Eastern and Western, Moroccan and Israeli - were
fused together to create a single visual language. In By the River, your newly completed
MATRIX installation, the different identities remain distinct and coexist. Can you talk about
what defines these identities and why you chose to keep them separate in this new
installation?

YS: I see By the River as a kind of extension of the floor piece from The Carpenter and the
Seamstress, which was the architectural plan of my parents' house. The panels in By the
River metaphorically derive from a zoom-lens view of one of the rooms or one of the figures.
In this way, the installation also can be read as a self-portrait.

In my work I relate to places or cultures that originally did not experience modernity or the
modernist ideal. To places like Morocco or Algiers, or to the Sephardic (non-Western)
cultures. These different kinds of groups immigrated to Israel from the 1950s through the
late 1960s and had to adapt themselves to a very different society whose essence was the
modernistic way of thinking. The coexistence found in my work results from thinking about
the insertion of a rich and expressive cultural narrative into the geometric forms of
modernism. One practical application of modernism as it existed in Israel was starting from
point zero, thus breaking from one's past and starting something anew. This way of thinking
was quite prevalent in Israel.

HZJ: Much of what you say about your work is expressed as metaphor. I know you attempt
to translate the personal into a language that is more open. I keep coming back to the
geographic location in which you are making your work. Can you talk about the influence
being in Israel has had on your thought processes?

YS: One of the dominant experiences for me as a child growing up in Israel was the feeling
of being disconnected from everything. The feeling of being in a culture where everything
came from a different place, and knowing that the things I experienced also continued to
exist in a totally different place. There was an absence of organic continuity. Things were
not really connected to their environment or their time.

HZJ: Where did you derive the images in By the River from?

YS: For me the installation is a screen full of images that can exist simultaneously against
totally different backgrounds. They can remind you of Japanese images such as bonsai
trees, or even of mountains in Switzerland; they can suggest the desert, buildings and
dramatic landscapes from the north and south of Israel. Images of explosion and of
upheaval can be volcanic eruptions but can also be interpreted as other things. The black
holes in the composition are the depths between the things. The black areas are not really
monochromatic, though; they are filled with bar codes, lines that have different rhythms.

I am specifically not talking about political situations. To be honest, although the situation is
so volatile in Israel, for me the only way to survive is to immerse myself completely in my
work, transforming the anxiety into a working system. I work in my underground studio
which to me is like a shelter. I feel totally isolated. I have windows but I cover them. It is very
important for me to work without natural light so as to have minimal temptations from the
outside.

HZJ: Can you describe your media?

YS: Well, it's a difficult question because it is not painting. I think it is something between
drawing and sculpture and painting. But I am not a painter, absolutely not. What I try to
convey are essences such as silhouettes, shadows of the image, the empty body and the
reflection of the image. It is like a map... You can have the diagram or data about the thing
but you never have the thing itself.

HZJ: What is the role of irony in your work?

YS: I think the strongest feeling when you're in Israel is that you see both sides of the stage.
You see the play and you also see the background - the backstage. You have a duality,
which makes you constantly aware of the mechanics at the expense of the play. Because
Israeli society is a new phenomenon, albeit with tenuous links to the past, you can feel the
gaps and lack of continuity between things, and then the pretense of the cultural facade is
revealed. Of course the way that I am answering you can sound like a cliché. However, I am
not dealing with clichés; I am interested in playing with these dualities in my art, to
juxtapose them and then to raise questions. What is the difference between being in a
situation or talking about it? How can you report an experience when you are totally in it?

The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum is made possible by the generous
endowment gift of Phyllis Wattis.

Additional donors to the MATRIX Program include the UAM Council MATRIX Endowment,
Ann M. Hatch, Eric McDougall, Glenn and April Bucksbaum, and Christopher Vroom and
Illya Szilak.

Yehudit Sasportas/MATRIX 200 By the River is made possible with generous support
from the Helen and Sanford Diller Supporting Foundation, a supporting foundation of
Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Additional support has been provided by the
Consulate General of Israel, San Francisco.