Yehudit Sasportas

Arter Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
Locus Solus, Arter Museum, Istanbul
Curated by Selen Ansen
30 Mar-31 Dec 2022

THE TIME DWELLERS / NO MAN'S LAND
WALLS NO. 14&15
THE LIQUID DESERT PROJECT

The Time Dwellers / No-Man’s Land is a site-specific installation, materializing a junction between image, sound, sculpture and architecture.

The installation is an integral part of the Liquid Desert Project that I have been elaborating over the past seven years with the aim of mapping individual and collective subconscious space.

From the exhibition text by Selen Ansen:

"The exhibition invites the audience on a journey through subterranean, heavenly and terrestrial realms, subconscious territories, past and lost or fantasized and never-existed places and various landscapes. The installation No-Man’s Land is an integral part of the Liquid Desert Project that the artist Yehudit Sasportas has been elaborating over the past 7 years with the aim of mapping individual and collective subconscious space. Featuring the Room No. 10, the installation presented at Arter is structured by two black walls that function as dividers and thresholds, supports and surfaces.

The architectural structure of the room serves as a container for repressed/non-verbalised emotions, while the works that take place in it activate/transform an unspoken life material which exists in the collective subconscious outside of language and time."

No-Man's Land - The Time Dwellers
Walls no.14&15, Installation view
Liquid Desert Project
Locus Solus exhibition
Arter museum, Istanbul

Left: HADVARIM Wall, no.14
Right: Wall no.15 / Different Chapters from The Liquid Desert Project

HADVARIM Wall, detail. 2022
3.5m x 17m x 0.5m
Plywood, Black lacked Wooden doors and drawers
The Time Dwellers/No Man's Land Installation
Liquid Desert project

Kelim, 2019. Exhibition view
75X115 cm, Archival pigment print.
Locus Solus, Arter museum, Istanbul. 2022

The Magnetic Shaky Table film
Part A&B, Installation view
Full HD video projection, 26:23-minute loop, includes sound
No-Man's Land - The Time Dwellers
Locus Solus, Arter museum, Istanbul.

Liquid Desert

Liquifying Reality—Solidifying Light

The Liquid Desert Project is an artwork of unusual scale and scope, as well as in its appearance and modus operandi in the public sphere. It is a sculptural and architectural project that combines and embodies both physical and metaphysical dimensions.

The project deals with the emergence and reflection of our hidden collective subconscious in the reality of our visible, physical existence, and in effect the site acts as an allegory to a three-dimensional sculptural diagram of the psyche.

The Liquid Desert Project is an underground architectural site that is virtually located in the Negev Desert in southern Israel and consists of 49 hidden rooms spread across three underground levels. The different subconscious rooms and levels enable the artist to develop unique, unusual artistic and philosophical processes as well as unusual collaborations.

The work comprises three main levels:

level 0 Ground level

Represents the specific location in Abraham Path in the Negev Desert, Israel. It serves as a parallel space to a physical museum or public exhibition space in the world, which hosts one of the Liquid Desert rooms. During the exhibition time, a continuous resonance field is being activated between Abraham’s Path in the desert and the physical exhibition space, through unique sound works.
level -1 The Illuminated Objects

Concerned with changing curation processes and with the visual expression of various installation possibilities, later exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.
level -2 The Shadow of Object

Concerned with the empty dark rooms that deal with the essence of the formation of ideas, bodies and forms.
level -3 The Inventory Code

Concerned with the inventory of subjects for different topics that Sasportas is leading with artists, philosophers, curators, authors and film directors.

Yehudit Sasportas is one of the most prominent and prolific Israeli artists working in the local and international art scene today. Her work is focused on site-specific installations, which include sculptures, drawings, video and sound works, and call for an intense sensory experience. Her installations have gone through a process of adapting and responding to the architecture of various museum spaces while forming into artworks that present a new way of reading architecture itself, as well as the wider cultural context it was created in.