Hansen | הנסן

Opening Event: Saturday, 15.7.2023, 19:30

As part of the 40th edition of the Jerusalem Film Festival, Intersections will hold an exhibition by Irit Batsry, which includes four installations comprised of video works and films. Acclaimed Israeli artist Irit Batsry, started out in the field of video art in Israel in 1981 and moved to New York in 1983. Since 2003, the artist has been collecting an “acccidental archive”, which includes over a thousand films, while using films as a medium in her installations, raising aesthetic and technological questions about ‘dead’ formats. Which memories do they preserve, and which memories do we choose to keep? What is the meaning of this death? What new life can these materials receive, both as artistic works with new meaning and poetics, when the content of the films is presented in a different context?

Most of the films in Batsry’s archive were bought at the flea market in Lisbon, where has been residing in part since 2002. The materials have been affected by the weather, preservation in non-purpose-built places, and mainly by time, which affects and changes every material. Batsry’s installations are palimpsests, layers of personal and collective history that are written and erased again and again: both in content and in material.

Irit Batsry is an artist who has primarily worked in video and installation art since 1980. Her works have been exhibited in 35 countries. She’s won numerous awards worldwide, including prizes for her films at festivals, the prestigious Bucksbaum award at the Whitney Museum Biennial (2002), and the Guggenheim Foundation award (1992). Her works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, among others.