Orit Hofshi: Control Cells, Winner of the Lazar Prize for Contemporary Art

According to the dictionary definition, a “landscape” is the sum of the formal features that distinguish a given area; that is, the whole perceived by the human subject’s gaze and interpreted by it. In Mishnaic Hebrew, the term refers to the upper part of a tree or plant that protrudes above the ground. In geometry, space is three-dimensional, while symmetry is a place whose boundaries move away from one another, broad and spacious. In Hebrew, the word makom (“place”) carries a range of meanings: a physical area or volume defined in space; a seat; a position in a formation, table, or competition; a geographic location; and also an empty space or expanse: “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place” (Genesis 1:9), or “and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place” (Jeremiah 7:32). Finally, metaphorically, “the Place” is a designation for God.

The work of Orit Hofshi (b. 1959, Kibbutz Matzuba) formulates intersecting interpretations of the concepts of landscape, space, and place. It repeatedly returns to the molds from which her images are created, testing their multiplicity, transformations, and modes of realization—and, at the same time, their clarity and ghosts. Her material and formal, intellectual and psychological actions are themselves landscape, space, and place, carrying within them history and time, and relationships between culture and nature: earth and water, humans and animals, as though they emerge from one another, mourn one another, and revive one another. Hofshi’s works are a body examining itself, its survival and loss, as a visual archive bearing the traces of the time of its formation.

The images are landscapes immersed in their ruins, perhaps in the process of being formed, in an interstitial space between a tangible place and no-place. They open up as compositions, rhythms, and echoes, while the cracked, turbulent earth seizes the entire field of vision. In a continuous seismographic movement—through the instability of the relationships between the figures appearing in the works and the places in which they are situated, and between the viewer and the landscape works spread before them—the horizon trembles and surfaces disintegrate.

Before us is a hybrid language composed of woodcuts, prints on handmade paper, printing boards made of wood, carved wooden blocks left unprinted, drawing and sketching in ink and pencil, rubbing, monotype printing, and spatial installations. In the exhibition Watchtowers, all these elements come together in an encompassing structure: a visual panorama that can be entered, contemplated, inhabited, and used as a means of remembering.

Woodcut, whose origins lie in ninth-century East Asia, is the oldest reproduction technique based on a block and copies. It reached Europe in the fifteenth century and became a central means of disseminating images, accompanied by technical development and an expanded representational capacity. In modernist movements, especially Expressionism, woodcut became a vehicle for ethical and political protest, charged with profound psychological and social meanings.

Woodcut lies at the heart of the structure of Hofshi’s monumental work. It undermines the distinctions between block, image, and object; between original and reproduction; and it is shaped through a masterful, pictorial and sculptural command of diverse means of expression. The images she creates, along with their traces and echoes, accumulate into an archive from which she continually draws to create new structures and meanings. Working on the large-scale pieces is intensive and physically demanding: drawing and carving images into wooden blocks; hand-printing by rubbing a wooden spoon over enormous sheets of paper; varying and controlling the pressure of the printing; then continuing the processes of drawing, erasing, and transferring; and finally creating connections and structures composed of wooden blocks and sheets of paper, often of both together. For several years, Hofshi regarded color as merely a distraction, but over the past decade her predominantly monochromatic palette has diversified, alongside the incorporation of additional printing and drawing techniques, in an attempt to deepen and intensify feelings of alienation and estrangement, tension, and existential fracture.

The current large-scale exhibition presents a contemporary trajectory alongside earlier works, leading the viewer into the depths of a dialogue between printmaking and installation art, between the printed image and spatial experience. Printmaking—as a portable, reproductive, and archival medium that points to a historical time—meets installation, a singular medium bound to place and time, a medium of the present. Into all of this, Hofshi introduces, for the first time, elements of prefabricated materials: watchtowers, underground structures used in sewage, drainage, electrical, and communications infrastructures, usually made of concrete or plastic. Graphic representations of the watchtowers are placed opposite their presence as actual objects, shaping the contours of the exhibition space.

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors working in Israel, in the “present” moment submerged in a vortex of violence, Hofshi creates work saturated with an awareness of uprooting, destruction, and war. She speaks of the universal and the timeless, while at the same time remaining rooted in local historical and political reality. Landscape carries within it a continual tension between nature and culture, between memory and erasure, as an active trauma. As an element inseparable from systems of survival, the watchtowers are linked for Hofshi in particular to the vital resource of water and the struggle over it, within the framework of control over nature, land, and place.

In Israeli art, landscape has been linked from its beginnings to the formation of national identity, to elevated and romanticized gazes, and to the representation and abstraction of the local within intersecting and contradictory narratives, between vision and blindness. Hofshi’s panoramic cinematic trajectory echoes repeated carving into wood, resembling an archaeological excavation moving backward and forward from its point of departure in the present. Time in her works is not linear; it returns and appears as a flash, like an open wound. Like the remnants of infrastructure and ruins, the human and animal figures bear witness to the event while also constituting an inseparable part of it. They move forward from the events while remaining stubbornly embedded within them, in a gesture of mourning and grief. The turbulent, all-encompassing scenes in her works are material and mental ruins, experienced through the body, inviting the viewer to retreat toward the surface, toward the depths of the mode of action.