The Laboratory
In her large-scale landscape drawings and installations, Yehudit Sasportas blends memory-based techniques, artificially arranged still lifes, video projections, and computer-generated sounds. The landscapes, which depict woods, moors, and mountain ranges, represent "mental landscapes" rather than real-world environments. They are profiles based on the individual subconscious. On closer inspection, what appears as a serene black-and-white idyll turns into an apocalyptic and alienating landscape. These bizarre settings are filled with contradictions, appearing both bleak and bright, delicate and profound, idyllic and threatening. The observer's attempt to find orientation fails as duplications, reflections, and different perspectives oscillate focus.
Sasportas’ work integrates profound contradictions such as outside vs. inside and reason vs. intuition, bringing together an antinomic method of the intended and intuitive, romantic and scientific aesthetics. These contradictions define her practice. In the installation Magnetic Heart Film, the viewer is placed between two magnetic poles, each projecting films that appear to dissolve into nothingness. This creates a magnetic field, accompanied by a constant humming sound. Sasportas uses this setup to explore existential themes and cognitive theories, such as Heidegger's "Lichtungen."
The exhibition, titled The Laboratory, highlights the experimental nature of Sasportas’ work. It reflects her desire to offer insight into her thought and creative processes, balancing both scientific and emotional/mental approaches to art. Through this, she invites the viewer to explore the hybrid world she creates, where ideas, perspectives, and methods are constantly reworked and combined.
Text By Hilke Wagner.
Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
