The body of Masha Yozefpolsky’s collected work attests to the fact that she is an unrelenting artist who uses strong expression, and who has a rare sensitive “inner eye.” Comparable perhaps to humanistic video artists such as Bill Viola and Irit Batsry, Yozefpolsky chose to encircle herself in a technological and cumbersome medium, and through it articulate modernistic, refined, spiritual, critical and mental poetry. “Poetry is the ultimate realm of survival,” she says in one of her more hallucinatory works.

Paul Valery once wrote that a bad poem is one that disappears into meaning. From this aspect, Yozefpolsky’s video poetry is good poetry. The words that serve it as well as the voices, images, materials, landscapes, odors, and lights that flicker and disappear; the slivers of reality, the illusions, cyclicity, sleeping, dreaming, her subterranean flight, sexual allusions, the city’s maze corridors that lead nowhere, escape exits, violence, the loss of direction—all these appear as codes that do not coalesce into coherent meaning.

The psycho-physical environments that Yozefpolsky offers function as psychic-sensory maps that draw circular routes, routes searching for an opening, a shelter, solid ground; routes that resemble a cerebral forest of nerves emerged in existential disorientation that undermines any rational interpretation.

The longed-for sleep, dreams, lullabies in different tongues voiced by different narrators, the brain as a womb-like space of events—a space far from decipherable, or one that can be accorded meaning, and contrary to the national inclination of the rational, seek—ad infinitum—and find meaning in everything.

Yozefpolsky’s conclusion is that in an irrational world there is something unrealistic in adhering to the rational, which entirely befits our political reality as Israelis. There is something in the current “situation” reminiscent of the atmosphere of the early 20th century, of those years during and after World War I, when no one knew who was fighting against whom, what was really going on and where all this would lead to. Art during those years responded with an outburst of nihilism and adopted the irrational as a platform for countless “disturbed” and important works of art.

I dare to suggest that Yozefpolsky is a unique voice in the contemporary art scene, one that looks at insane reality and responds with the reflective, existential poetry of a person in an era in which wisdom is absent. She invites us to “rest” in a world of deconstruction, hoping that only there relevant meaning will develop for “the whole story.”

Naomi Aviv