Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, in this exhibition Ella Amitay Sadovsky assumes the role of a storyteller, unfolding absurd fictional tales with no beginning or end. Like the Eastern folktales, and like life itself, these intertwine multiple and even contradictory narratives, alternating between a contemplative and amused tone.

In her previous works, Amitay Sadovsky shifted between large-scale paintings that combine colorful textures and painting animation installations, mostly of the family and domestic space. Her characteristic collagist painting language sets a multilayered ambivalence and relativism as the starting point for observation. The world of textile and decorative patterns often served her as a rich resource that demonstrates how human, flora, and fauna imagery can float together on the surface, tied by a nonhierarchical inner logic. 

Here, for the first time Amitay Sadovsky presents animated scenes on large painted screens that draw inspiration from Indian miniatures, transforming their flat decorativeness into fantastical landscapes. These are used as the backdrop for animated scenes, where paper cutouts of figures and animals come alive with their projection on the painting. Using this unique new technique, which she developed for the exhibition, the artist creates a wealth of absurd and fanciful scenes that defy world order and logic. The cutouts serve her as a conceptual and theatrical means. They are doomed to move through the cycles of Saṃsāra – human suffering, towards Nirvana – the freedom from pain. 

The desert and the sea are referenced in all acts, suggesting a familiar yet fictional eastern landscape. In the first act, Under the Sun, the top half that depicts an arid abandoned village is contrasted with the surreal drama that unfolds below it: multiple faces glimpse through the colorful silhouettes of a herd galloping on the hills, their sad eyes seem to pierce through the layers of painting and the soul. In the middle, a carefree woman and donkey walk along an arched staircase that bridges the two worlds – the still and the precarious. 

The second act, One by One, centers on women that seem to be frozen still on a carpet/platform that miraculously hovers above the sea. Sporadically, an animated avatar springs out of one of the still women and nimbly climbs one of the trees, before returning to inhabit the painted body. This absurd spectacle offers a moment of escapism, which perhaps allows a temporary release from one’s body and circumstances.  

The last act, Unto the Place from Whence the Rivers Come, is borrowed from a Tibetan mandala and presents an idyllic landscape, painted from both a bird’s eye and side view. At its center, swimmers go round and round in an infinite motion, swimming alongside fish that alternately swallow and spit them out. The eyes set in the bodies of the animals around them seem to watch the absurdity of their existential state. In the words of the Koheleth (Ecclesiastes 1:2-14): "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity […] One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. […] All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.[…] I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” 

Shir meller Yamaguchi, curator