Keren Benbenisty

A Series of 500 drawings, text copied with carbon paper on newsprint paper, H.56 L.30 cm H.22″ L.12″ in. Custom-made cloth box H.23″ L.13″ in. 2012

The project Isotopes is a daily ongoing project which is made by collecting headlines from the New York Times. Each headline is copied by hand onto a blank sheet of newspaper using carbon paper. The size of each drawing is equal to the original format of the New York Times, and each headline is solely inscribed at the same place of the original layout. The selected headlines do not reveal the time nor the article’s matter. Erasing the content of the daily newspaper, removes the frame that surrounds the event and transforms the archive of headlines into an intimate and personal diary.

Photo credit Gil Lavi

A Series of objects, offset prints; pages from a book, wood board. 10″/10″ inch. 25/25 cm (each). 2015

Memory and gaze into the past invade Keren Benbenisty`s inventory through the pages of the book Crafts in Israel (1974) which chanced into her hands. In the series Seven she cancels the distinction between art and crafts by brutally screwing utilitarian-mundane objects onto archival pictures documenting handicrafts and cataloging items. The pages of the book become a space that combines three tenses: the past documented in the book, the year in which it was published, and the present in which the artist collects and arranges the “finds” into contemporary archeology.

Tali Ben-Nun.

Installation view, Gatherer/ Non Functional Display curated by Tali Ben-Nun at the Artist House, Jerusalem, IL

Four-channel video and sound installation, 6’ minutes (each) 2017

The installation looks at the cyclical notion of water through the production of silk in Japan and the Prussian Blue Pigment. Two pairs of videos parallel both natural and artificial metamorphosis in silk production. The second pair of videos is based on the scientific transformation of Prussian blue pigment into a medication treating radioactive contamination.

The project is a visual essay on our conflicting relationship to nature that can be expressed with the word plant, “being both a factory and green spurt of nature in garden and forest? Is not this ultimate deception the unforced, natural poetry, combining the manmade with the natural ? “ What Color is the Sacred, Michael Taussig

The project was produced in the Arts Maebashi Museum artist-in-residency program.
Jun Igarashi (curator)
Toshihiro Fukunishi (production)
Participants: Nobue Higashi, Wataru Hiraish, Tetsuya Matsumura and Setsuyo Matsumura.

Image and Editing Keren Benbenisty
Sound Manuela Schininà
Text Brooke Larson

Mandarin peels mounted on archival digital inkjet print, H.33″ L.43” in. A series of drawing-flags, ballpoint blue pen on polyester blank ready-made white flags, H.60” L.36” in. 2015

An imaginary map based on database of 113 names of commercial blue colors. In the contemporary industry, colors are poetically named, in addition to their commercial codes. These fake names of synthetic colors, take all that color had been with reference to the world of plants, bugs and minerals and adds the magic of artifice, frequently the colonial exotic, as Roland Barthes notes, when he buys colors he does so according to the “mere sight of their name. The name of the color outlines a kind of generic region within which the exact, special effect of color in unforeseeable: the name is then a promise of a pleasure, the program of an operation.”

Installation view, Sextant, NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY

Site specific installation. Erased Oxford dictionary, archival inkjet prints, orange peels, hand-carved limestone Nespresso coffee machines and its parts, slide projection (80 slides) made with carbon paper mounted on 35mm slides, Kodak slide projector, rear-projection on acrylic screen. 2015

“Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants – perhaps semi-barbaric people – who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells then of the history and meanings of these archeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him––and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house: the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!Stones speak!” [Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, (1896)]

For her residency-end exhibition, Keren Benbenisty transforms El Museo de Los Sures into a temporally ambiguous location, a scene of excavation where objects from the past are revealed. In his Freudian analysis of the concept of the archive, Jacques Derrida established the authored nature of the archive as a recording method through which the past is ordered and the future controlled. This is contrasted with the immediacy of archeology, where the context and history of objects arise directly from their immediate being, without the categorization of the archivist. By conceptualizing the gallery space as an archeology site, the exhibition questions contemporary interpretations of language and codes; the spoken versus written, the word versus the image. In Benbenisty’s work, speech is not audibly spoken but inscribed across layers of history.

Mary L. Coyne

Installation views, Saxa Loquuntur Stones Speak, El Museo de Los Sures, Brooklyn, NY (Photo credit Jeanette May)

HD video, 14′ min, Hebrew with English subtitles.

The film was made with the participation of Dr. Menachem Goren, Tel Aviv University, School of Zoology and The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. 2017

Named after the developer of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Lessepsian migration refers to the migration of species from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. This migration has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on the local ecology, engendering local and endemic species. Once considered a wonder of the industrial revolution, connecting east and west, the effects of the Suez Canal, are seen from a distance of almost 150 years, and from a very different political climate with the fish acting as a metaphor for human migrants.
The film juxtaposes the scientific classification process and the artistic process, and both refer in various ways to the Biometric identifiers used in the USA and elsewhere. The fish skin is treated like human fingerprints, and the installation focuses on the fish skin as an organic body transformed into a processed material via the production of three image types: 19th century Japanese Gyotaku prints, in which ink is placed on the fish which is then rubbed on rice paper; photography, 35mm slides in which processed fish skin acts as film; and digital video. These processes correspond to the migration timeline and the development of image making techniques.

Irit Tal

Video–drawing installation, HD video projection on a drawing, loop 60 sec, H.52’’ L.61” in. 2014

The video-drawing installation Kamil, questions contemporary interpretations of language and codes; the spoken vs written, the word vs. the image. As a nexus point to these riddles is the figure of the sphinx, who according to legend acted as guardian of the city, only allowing passage to those who could reply correctly to the riddles she posed.

Kamil draws its title from a graffiti tag on the Fontaine du Palmier in Place de Chatelet in Paris that Benbenisty photographed before moving to New York. A nexus in her current series of work, the Napoleonic-era fountain featuring a head of a Sphinx facing the four cardinal directions is, for Benbenisty, a fountain of water and language. Benbenisty’s sphinx, speaking in gurgling water, poses riddles in a silent language that does not have written form. Likewise ambiguous in meaning, (translated to “the perfect one” in Arabic in addition to having roots in early Etruscan, Turkish and Greek) the graffiti is in part an individual’s solution to the sphinx’s ongoing riddle, an ambiguous response to the fountain’s silent speech.

Mary L. Coyne

Detail from the video installation.

Installation, engraved carbon paper mounted on 35mm slides (80), slide projector (timer), archival inkjet print mounted in acrylic box, H.30″ L.40″ in. H.76 L.101 cm. 2016

The House of Dust by Alison Knowles is among the earliest computer-generated poem that was translated into a physical structure in Chelsea, New York. This architecture was later destroyed, restored and moved to Cal Arts Burbank, California, where Knowles was invited to teach in 1970-72. She enjoyed teaching her classes in the House and invited artists to interact with its open structure by creating new works.

In a series of 80 words-drawing engraved on carbon paper and mounted on blank 35mm slides, Benbenisty is quoting the most detailed description of the architectural elements of the tower of Babel. She applies a font created for the internet interface, the new Babylonian space.

Based on its existing technology, the reCAPTCHA, originally developed by Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University, was created in an attempt to capitalize on this brief, conceptual labor. Like the CAPTCHA interface, reCAPTCHA asks users to enter words seen in distorted text images onscreen to determine whether or not the user is human. By presenting two words it both protects websites attempting to access restricted areas and helps digitize the text of the archives of The New York Times and books from Google Books. By correctly translating the images into typed words, the user gains access to the desired webpage.

Detouring towards the tower of Babel, the first myth relating architecture and language, Dust of Babel is highlighting the deconstruction of translation and underscoring the absence of physicality in a digital society.

Installation view in A House of Dust by Alison Knowles at The James Gallery, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Photo: Samuel Draxler

Triptych, artist’s fingerprints on painted wood panels, W.12′ H.8′ ft. / W.375 H.245 cm. 2008

Installation view, Forever Young curated by Ami Barak at ANNE+ Art Projects, Ivry/Seine, FR (Photo credit Remy Lidereau)

A series of drawings, approximately 300 Pages, H.11 L.9 in. H.28 L.22 cm (each), sixteen bottles, erasure residue, 8oz. 2013

An architectural assemblage made out of 300 drawings – erased offset sheets from a deconstruction of The Burghley Collection: a catalogue showcasing a collection of antique Oriental porcelains from 17th century Japan.

The original catalogue manifest early points of contact between the Orient and the Occident and attest to a cross-cultural fertilization in the pre-industrial era that can be read into their decoration. ‘A politic of the decorative,’ the porcelains were intended for Western export, catering to Western taste for the Oriental. The shape of the ceramics often followed European designs, while the painted decorations had the charge of representing the object’s Eastern origin.

The porcelains in the collection signify exchange and cultural hybridity, but they also speak of the exoticization of the other, and implies issues of domination and power. The gesture of effacement revisits the chosen ‘cultural object’ through its printed form, making it appear and disappear simultaneously, and eventually turning it into a new image. It is an operation that marks and highlights as much as it erases. The erasing gesture is a way of doubting, or denying what is there.

1/16 bottles, erasure residue, 8oz.

Installation view, Under Erasure, curated by Irith Hadar at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Israel

Installation, HD Video, fish skin mounted on 35mm slides (80), Kodak slide projector, ink on fish scale under magnifying loop, Gyotaku prints. Vitrine display: ink on tissue paper over pages from a book (Lessepsian Migration by Dr. Francis Dov Por) 2017

In her current body of work, Keren Benbenisty studies the Lessepsian fish migration, relying on the work of Tel Aviv University Zoologist, Dr. Menachem Goren, who also participates in one of the works. The Lessepsian migration is named after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Suez Canal engineer, which was constructed in 1859-1869, and, backed by the modern belief in progress, was considered among the most important accomplishments of the industrial revolution and of human intervention in nature – and simultaneously, a prime manifestation of European imperialism. The opening of this new water channel brought forth a massive migration of aquatic specifies from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, one that has had a significant impact on the latter’s ecological system.

Benbenisty follows the zoologists as they return from the sea, as they weigh, measure, and classify the fish. She studies their scientific methods – yet these serve her in a parallel, imagined procedure, whose purpose is the creation of an image: sorting the fish according to an invented time-axis that begins in 1869, when the Suez Canal was opened; documenting fish spices by covering them in black ink and imprinting their form on paper using the Japanese Gyotaku printing technique; removing the fish skin, processing it and cutting it in uniform size, from which 35mm slides are prepared and ordered according to (partially invented) skin tones. The names of these colors are charted in an index, as if they are scientific codes.

In its imprinting on the Japanese paper and in its transformation into a celluloid-like transparent substance, the makeup of the skin fish – its texture and colors – is revealed in its singularity, like a fingerprint, a human marker. Its appearance in the analog light of the slide projector recalls digital methods of biometric data storage – and the traditional Japanese-style stampings of its scales evoke the type of border crossing stamps used in the pre-digital era, which distinguish residents, foreigners and immigrants. As in a metamorphosis of skin through light, Benbenisty transforms the fish skin into a substance on which traces of migration are marked. These traces are inherent in the skin tones given to each piece of skin fish, alluding to the evolution of human skin – from black to white – brought about by a change in light conditions during the migration of prehistoric man from Africa to Europe. The light, therefore, writes the history of both natural and forced migration on the skin. Just as it imprints an image – so too it erases and nullifies, marking both skin and mind with memory, identity and alienation.

Irit Tal

Light, Skin – video still

On Black & White

Island (Detail)

Installation view, Jaydia, Genia Schreiber Gallery, Tel Aviv University, IL (Photo credit Elad Sarig)

Installation, artist fingerprints on wood panels, hand-carved Travertine stone, edition of newsprint, Offset metal sheet, video projection. 2016

Mare nostrum (Latin, Our Sea) was a Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. In 2013 the term gained new meaning when the Italian government authorized “Operation Mare Nostrum,” a military and humanitarian operation aimed to rescue refugees and arrest traffickers. The project Mare nostrum developed from Keren Benbenisty desire to embody the contemporary notion of the sea whilst looking back at its status as metaphor and motif, in the work of Gustave Courbet.

“With its powerful associations with creation and destruction, with men`s destiny and voyage into the unknown, and unpredictable natural forces, the sea was taking on an increasingly important role in art and literature” in the 19th century. These artists portrayed the sea “alongside a political climate (colonization), technological advances (railways and steam-powered vessels) and social shifts…” This new body of work will investigate the ways in which these ideas have developed and shifted over the last decades.

The project is based on three occurrences from the late 19th century: the end of Romanticism and the advancement of realism with the introduction of photography; Offset printing techniques in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface; the construction of Suez Canal in Egypt, which opened in 1869. It was also the origination of the phenomenon known as Lessepsian Migration: one-sided ongoing migration of marine species from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea that has had a serious impact on the Mediterranean ecology, endangering many local and endemic Mediterranean species. Seemingly, these three occurrences have nothing in common. However, they are bound together with the industrialization and the emergence of modernism.