Vivian Birkenfeld

Artist Statement:

Memory, gaze and thoughts

As if running out of time, I feel an urgent need to deal with buildups, accumulated within me, layer upon layer, over the years, like an archaeologist, excavating and exposing deeper levels.

My art evolves in parallel courses:

Dozens of documents, kept in an old suitcase, disclose my grandparents' journey from an old, menacing world towards a promise of a better life in Argentina. Out of stained photographs, unknown faces smile at me, strangely familiar. Some perished in the holocaust, others escaped and dispersed across the world. These testimonies pulled me in, and serve as raw material to a series of large drawings in which they are resurrected. Out of buildings, windows and shadows, their images rise as ghosts, present and non-present.

Dealing with these histories has led me to confront my own immigration to the State of Israel. In an alleged autobiographic documentary I provoke many gaps: ideological, cultural and linguistic.

Side by side with the narrative series, I find great pleasure in sketching sceneries out of photographs, which I snap across the country. A new series, verging on the abstract, describes cells and biomorphic shapes fighting each other.
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B.A. and M.A. in Art History from the Tel Aviv University.
Art studies at the Avni Art Institute, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Graphics at the Technion branch in Tel Aviv
Givatayim Free Workshop of Art