Hansen | הנסן

Due to the current security situation, the exhibition has been postponed until further notice.

Over the past three decades, Ariel Wardi has been working in the “small room”– that serves as a studio and tiny private press where he prints and binds books, stacked in a tower rising as high as the ceiling. In his private press, he uses traditional printing techniques long abandoned by the commercial printing industry. Wardi developed unique methods to cut and create his own type, printing on a Vandercook Letterpress, sewing and binding the books by hand. Every one of the hundreds of books has a unique binding, some made of sand and earth. Each book is distinct, each copy essentially an original. Wardi, born in 1929, is one of the last people in Israel to work in traditional printing press methods. In contrast to the act of printing inherently meant for mass reproduction and distribution, Wardi’s stacked books constitute a fundamentally private body of work, much like drawings placed in a file cabinet.

Artist Hadassa Goldvicht (b. 1981) as initially trained as a printmaker. Her works explore the relationship between language as raw material and the body, engaging in the visual and sensory deconstruction of language and letters, and investigating different forms of reading and writing. Throughout the encounter with Wardi and his oeuvre, the two found they shared a common language. Goldvicht began to document Wardi’s work based on a shared fascination with language and methods Wardi has been exploring over the past decades.