Chiara Valci Mazzara

Shoshanah’ Ciechanowski

ongoing show and performance

In-between / My NameIs/YOU 

Curated by Chiara Valci Mazzara

.2014 WIJ project Space, Berlin,Germany

.2015 Villa Poggio San Felice, Florence,Italy

.2016 Andel’s Art, Lødz, Poland

(Chapters: Jerusalem #1 | Tel Aviv #2, #6 | Berlin #3 | Florence #4 | London #5 | Lodz #7 )

Shoshanah Ciechanowski explores the roots of humanity, beyond nationality, identity, language and culture. In an attempt to find answers to her personal questions, she uses her artistic practice as a link to a new form of communication: There is always an action and a reaction. Therefore, influences gained through the experience would continue as a personal change and deliver it. Feelings play a crucial role in determining behavior. Our collective emotional scale influences our environment. The environment, in turn, can facilitate or discourage interactions among people.

During the performance MYNAMEIS, the ‘viewer’ is invited to take a step – by sharing his name and a wish/statement. For about one hour Ciechanowski, standing behind a glass pane, writes up ambidextrously people’s words. The result is bound by its form and the content becomes relative. The words, representing a watermark between the dialogue and the interaction, become a fluid circular content. By using her body as a pivotal tool the artist creates ‘suspended time’ which enables different communication.

EARTH WALK site-specific performance, is a continuation of MYNAMEIS. A walk from ‘A’ to unknown ‘B’ involves approaching random people, in time intervals, with the aim to create an Emotional Geography. In each of the intervals, Shoshanah intends to walk with the stranger for 72 steps, then collect information from the meetings. The essence of these encounters will be subsequently extracted through a drawing on a satellite photograph.

In series of drawings Landscape Borders # and SCHUT # a multifarious transformation occurs. Ciechanowski usually begins with a canonical text, speech or a poem, setting geometrical territories or statistical data, visible through their movement in form and content on paper. The encounter between the artist’s research, the variety of colors and drawn marks, reveals her purpose to re-establish a level of communication.
Beyond language and before words, Ciechanowski proceeds, thus, finding the materiality through contracting aural input. The speech transforms into writing and writing gains interaction with colors and textures, leaving its semantic value behind. A drawing, an action. These action-drawings are represented by a new gaze in her video works. The artist’s body is now an alternate topic, through it she unravels in the whole process the dialogue between the performance and the visual depiction.

Shoshanah Ciechanowski’s multi-disciplinary practice unfolds the tension between content and form. Her work is engaged with the quest for balance through movement, rhythm and sound. Aiming to grasp a present moment, she is generating a mirror questioning the interval between individual and society. Her work attempts to reveal, behind hidden patterns, a basic longing which brings together the mechanisms of the heart.

Shoshanah Ciechanowski (b. 1973), based in Tel-Aviv. She graduated from the BFA Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem in 2000. Since 2004, she has conducted several workshops focused on emphasizing the importance of practice through reconstructing. Ciechanowski has taken part in numerous group shows in Israel and abroad and held solo exhibitions in Israel, UK, Germany, and Italy. Her works are in private and public collections in Germany, Austria, Italy, Israel, France, UK, and USA.

 Jerusalem #1 | Tel Aviv #2, #6 | Berlin #3 | Florence #4 | London #5 | Lodz #7