Elinor Sahm is GlogauAIR resident
from July, 2020 to September, 2020
Elinor Sahm is a multidisciplinary artist focused on site-specific installations. In addition to being site-specific, Elinor’s exhibitions are audience-dependent and single-viewer-dependent: the installations are accompanied by performances and the artist’s presence in space, which create an overall system that wraps and immerses viewers within the work, making them an integral part of it, making a one-off connection between her and them.
Meet the Artist
For her project in GlogauAIR Elinor worked from her own contrasted identity, taking as anchor point the stories behind her German part of the family; in particular her great grandfather who was Mayor of the City of Berlin from 1931 and 1935, and her other great grandfather, a Jewish man and a very present figure in her childhood and family memories.
Statement
Elinor Sahm is a multidisciplinary artist focused on site-specific installations. She seeks to create for the viewers ambiguous and astonishing environments, inviting them to wonder about the nature of the works, and try to unravel the magic of their creation.
Elinor’s works originate from the thought of a dark space, which she brings to life through the use of lighting – a key element of her work. Through the relationship formed between darkness and light, an elusive game is created, one of discovery and cover, concealment and exposure. The light is not only functional but receives volume in the installation space, and becomes a material in its own right: material that can be designed, placed and routed in space.
The preparations are always accompanied by a laborious and strenuous process that requires a great deal of physical and mental resources, connecting the artist to the atmosphere of feminine toil, an issue which is familiar to her as a descendant of a Sephardic family from Jerusalem: women who sit together rolling vine leaves, or any other substance who requires laboring and kneading, transforming the raw material into a sensory experience.
Elinor’s family background also includes diverse German roots, riddled with well known cultural heroes and family anecdotes, which happen to be also common folk tales. The gap between these two cultural extremes fills her work with mixed elements: intellectual issues versus emotional perspectives, alienation, and detachment versus kinship and affinity, imagination and actuality. This interaction is a constant collision igniting sparks and flaring.
In addition to being site-specific, Elinor’s exhibitions are audience-dependent and single-viewer-dependent: the installations are accompanied by performances and the artist’s presence in space, which create an overall system that wraps and immerses viewers within the work, making them an integral part of it, making a one-off connection between her and them.
GlogauAIR Project
During my time at GlogauAIR I would like to take a deeper and closer look into my contrasted identity, the stories behind my German family’s heritage and the questions it brings up, in particular, those involving Berlin. I wish to look into it through the lens of the concept of self-denial as a mean of survival and the unavoidable destruction that follows. A concept that was the main subject of my work in the past year and was very much present in my recent solo exhibition in Tel-Aviv.
CV Summary
EDUCATION
- 2013 BFA from Bezalel Academy
- 2012 Bezalel’s exchange program with the UDK, Berlin
EXHIBITIONS
- 2019 solo show, ‘The Bell Has Rung But The Queen Is Underwater’ curated by Eitan Buganim at the ‘Tel-Aviv Artists’ Studios’
- 2019 ‘Manofim’ contemporary art festival in Jerusalem with ‘The Test Tube Group’
- 2018 exhibition in ‘Hansen House’ with ‘The Test Tube Group’
- 2018 group show at ‘Villa’ gallery
- 2014 solo exhibition ‘Lucida’, curated by Ayelet Amorai Biran at the ‘First Station’ project gallery space, Jerusalem
Gallery
