…“Poetry is the ultimate realm of survival,“ she says in one of her more than ever 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 mazes, the 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 routs, routs searching for an opening, a shelter, solid ground; routs 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 – indicate a destination of desire 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, and particularly the 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, while hoping that only there relevant meaning will
develop for “the whole story.”
Naomi Aviv
