Botzina
In the exhibition “Botzina”, humanity and nature are deeply intertwined, each bearing the traces of the other. The softness offered by the gentle reed is not a sign of weakness; rather, the ability to bend, adapt, and exist within a relationship serves as a source of vitality and survival. Through this lens, artist Ayelet Ginosar Cohen seeks to reveal, within fragile materiality, a light that emerges and fades between layers of paper, leaves, text, embroidery, and memory.
By way of metaphor, the work moves between the golden, luminous Verbascum plant (Botzin) and the Kabbalistic concept of “Botzina Dekardinuta”, a small candle flickering in the dark. In the space between the earthly and the spiritual, the artist is driven by a desire to draw near, connect, and decipher, alongside the awareness that something will always remain elusive. Through an intensive process of collage, she crafts connections among recurring images using drawing, printmaking, cutting, embroidery, and application of masking tape. This everyday, inexpensive material, easily torn, becomes in her hands the very medium of creation and the surface of the artwork itself. Female deer (Ayelet), cyclamens, Verbascum branches, palm trees, figures, and places appear, duplicate, and break off. Layer covers layer, as the revealed and the hidden are exposed simultaneously. Within this visual tangle, childhood memories from the kibbutz, proximity to nature, family stories, and loss are woven together. The female deer, whose name the artist bears alongside its scriptural references, together with the flora, figures, and other details, connect a physical landscape to an inner landscape of memory and belonging.
Nothing stands alone here: material relies on material, image upon image, individual upon family, and human upon environment. The act of connecting does not erase the tears and fractures; it leaves them visible. Perhaps the light of the small candle – the Botzina – does not dispel the shadows or solve every mystery, but instead allows things to emerge from the medium, briefly illuminating the delicate web of connections in which we live, and reminding us of our responsibility to protect it.
Avital Katz
Exhibition Curator
