What is, is; and what is not, is not, Tel Aviv, through September 5

“What is, is; and what is not, is not.” This is how Parmenides put one of the primary assertions of Western thought. Only what is is thinkable, while the is-not eludes perception. However, art, again and again, insists on dwelling in the elusive space between these two poles. Hundreds of years after Parmenides, Jacque Derrida suggested thinking of the notion of a trace as a realm where presence and absence are not opposites but are interwoven. The trace is not only a mark left by a thing that is no more, but the way in which what has disappeared continues to act within matter, memory, and consciousness. It repeatedly reveals that an absence is not a void; absence leaves behind marks, remains, and traces, and sometimes they are the ones who bear the greatest power of presence.

The starting point of the exhibition is Richard Long’s foundational work, A Line Made by Walking (1967). This work is not presented at the exhibition, but it reverberates through it. Long did not create an image of a walking body; he let the body be the drawing tool. The repeated walking on the grass left a line — a minimalist, almost invisible gesture – turning it into the artistic act. The body is no longer there, but its action lingers on. The artwork is not the documentation of movement, but of its trace.

All the works in the exhibition have been born out of similar logic. They do not display the body but the consequences of its encounter with the world. The body presses, erodes, kisses, turns, erases, blows, scrubs, walks, winds up, or photographs – and at the same time it also disappears. All that is left is the material that bore the action, the surface that absorbed it, the light that remembered it, or the time engraved in it. The action is over, but its impression continues to exist, as a material ghost. In this sense, the works suggest a new reading of Parmenides’s assertion: perhaps what “is” is not just the present body, but also the mark it has left behind. And perhaps the “is not” is not an absolute absence, but the realm where presence transforms into material memory.

Chen Cohen’s work has materialized from a continuous, intimate act in which two bodies rub a third with rags. The rags, which have absorbed the traces of the skin, sweat, and touch, are no longer tools; they become the work’s substrate. When they are sewn together into a human body-sized sheet, they do not describe a body but carry its memory – a kind of second skin, material witness of a past action.

In Noa Pardo’s work, the act of drawing takes place simultaneously on the canvas and behind it. The scraping, erasing, and rubbing embed the charcoal in the fabric’s fibers, as its particles seep through the canvas, leaving an unintended shadow on the wall. Only when the work is removed is its “ghost” revealed — an image that is not the work itself, but the traces it has left behind where it had once resided.

Ayelet Riza’s series of works is created through the repetitive act of imprinting lipsticked kisses. This intimate gesture, associated with love, is transformed through repetition into a mechanism of erosion. From a distance, the imprints resemble an organic bloom, but up close they are revealed as an open mouth, as a wound. The physical gesture is imbued with political significance: just as slogans repeated over and over again are emptied of their meaning, so does the kiss become a trace of seduction, violence, and an unfulfilled promise.

In Bezalel Ben-Chaim’s video work, the body marks the space through spinning. The artist spins on his own axis on a hill in the middle of the desert, gradually accelerating until he loses his balance. The camera, intended to record the world, ultimately captures the collapse of the body holding it. The landscape remains unchanged, but the movement captured in it becomes a testament to the moment when the body has ceased to control its gaze.

In Ora Brill’s work, the act of drawing accumulates into a single body. Dozens of drawings on old notebooks and books coalesce into a living artist book. In the video work The Spirit of the Notebooks, the notebooks flip through their own pages, as if an invisible force animates them. The body that has made the drawings is absent, yet the rhythm of its action continues to pulse amongst the pages.

Hadas Hassid’s works study moments when control breaks down. The spitting repeatedly recreates the pen’s involuntary ejection of ink — that tiny glitch that occurs when the hand pauses. The act of reproduction transforms the incidental into an intentional gesture. Alongside them, the work The Wipes preserves the absorbent papers used to clean the tools, transforming the waste into evidence of the action. In the series of spirals and loops, the body encircles the paper suspended in space, moving around it and marking it from all sides. The line is not merely a drawing on a surface, but a recording of the body’s trajectory through space.

In Thirtsa Ullmann’s series of circles, the body itself becomes a clock’s hand. Positioned in the center of the page and moving in a continuous circular motion, the long paintbrush traces circles in black ink. The repetitive whirling recalls a ritual or a dance, in which the line does not describe movement but is born from it. The circles are the residue of a meditative act, an inner journey recorded on paper.

For Hayah Sheps-Avtalion, light is the medium that bears the traces of movement. Through long exposures and slow, precise body movements, the camera does not freeze reality but rather records the path of the movement itself. Light ceases to be a means of illumination and becomes a drawing, and the photograph is the memory of a dance that has already ended.
Shoval Klushiner’s two works explore how the body is present through the change it generates in matter. A Submissive Stone Beneath a Frozen Swarm of People refers to a historically fraught flight of stairs, worn down over time by the movement of countless bodies. History is represented not through a human figure but through the stone itself, which bears the cumulative weight of those who are absent. In the second work, Down Comforter, a down comforter is compressed in a printing press until it loses its volume and becomes a thin surface — a sort of negative of a body that has vanished. The warmth, weight, and breath cease to exist, but their imprint remains embedded in the material.

Dafna Tal’s two-channel video work is a visual interpretation of the expression “to throw sand in one’s eyes” — a cross-linguistic idiom describing a deliberate act of deception and distortion of the truth. The work is shot simultaneously from two perspectives, in a direct, unmanipulated manner. The tossing of sand at the lens transforms it from an aggressive act into a performative gesture that creates shifting, abstract forms. These forms captivate the eye, but at the same time, a layer of sand accumulates, gradually obscuring the camera’s field of vision — and that of the viewer as well.

Amalia Rubin presents an artwork consisting of two fabric surfaces, serving as a sort of stage for her feet as they depict the five basic positions of classical ballet in Acrylic paint. The body, which has aged and lost its former capabilities, seeks to re-enact a movement that has once been second nature to it and is now a living memory, yet one that is gradually fading.

Bracha Guy presents a floating object, resembling a black cloud, made of interwoven and coiled metal wire and textile fragments. The tangled mass and the movement inherent in the object evoke the action of fingers that keep coiling and twisting, and the energy of the hand repeatedly bending the wire.

Alejandra Okret’s small-scale work is a painted surface in a vivid shade of green, known in Hebrew as “grass green.” Its rough, tactile quality is the result of intense finger-work and a palpable physicality. The work draws on Eva Hoffman’s book, A Stranger Among the Words, in which she describes how words acquired in one’s native language carry sensory connotations. Thus, for example, the word *césped* (“grass” in Spanish) does not merely denote a concept; it evokes a scent, a taste, a texture, and physical memories.

The works in the exhibition echo actions that have taken place in the past — actions that gave rise to the image or shaped the object — but are no longer present in their exhibited form in the gallery space. Only their material remains are on display. Thus, the absent body becomes the central presence in the exhibition: it is invisible to the eye, yet continues to act through the traces it has left behind. The exhibition offers a reversal of Parmenides’s paradox. Absence does not negate existence; it bestows upon it one of its profound and most complex forms. The works do not seek to restore the body that is no longer there, but rather to point out the way in which it continues to exist — through matter, time, and traces.