Artist Statement 

“Art is not an object, it is an experience.”

My creative process is rooted in residency—often self-initiated residencies that I build for myself. Structure is essential in order to form a body of work that is deep and layered, which is why I situate myself within communities and ethnographic frameworks. After October 7th, for example, I created work while living alongside evacuees from Sderot and Kiryat Shmona at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Tel Aviv, and later with displaced families after the Iranian missile strike in Petach Tikva, together with my dog Rio, at the Benjamin Hotel in Herzliya. Similarly, my travels to India at the end of the first year of the war became another form of residency that shaped my practice.

I am drawn to the phrase “Every person is the landscape of their homeland.” For me, the ethnographic background of each subject, human or animal, becomes a landscape that frames the project. Recently, I have been working on a project called “Canaani”—a dog who lived for four years in the Bedouin periphery, moving between shelters and kennels, before finally relocating to Tel Aviv.

One of the most formative periods of my practice was in New York, after completing my BFA at Bezalel. Pursuing an MFA in Documentary Cinema there allowed me not only to expand my artistic language but also to test how the city itself would shape my art. This dual perspective—as a painter and as a documentarian—defines my position as what I call a visual diarist.

In recent years, my work has been about dismantling and reconstructing the present moment—the event we call “now.” My paintings no longer attempt to capture objective reality with precision; instead, they demand patience, inner observation, and a willingness to let images overlap and collide. Each painting is an attempt at both deconstruction and reconstruction, a practice of addition and erasure.

When I photograph or film people, it is often a step toward painting them. For me, painting is not merely representation but a way of connecting—an embodied encounter with the subject. Narrative, in this sense, is fluid. What matters is not the linear story, but the psychological undercurrents, the subtext, and the atmosphere of experience. I approach each subject as an individual with authenticity, conflict, fragility, and resilience.

In my process, I become wholly attentive to the situation, constantly negotiating between reality and manipulation—between raw documentation and the cinematic tools of construction. I believe art demands an escape from reality, which makes it paradoxical and fascinating to apply this in documentary film. But ultimately, everything can be found within reality itself.

Art, to me, is inseparable from life. It is not a product but an excretion—like the natural outflow of the body, art emerges as an inevitable extension of living. It is memory and longing, dismantling and reconstruction, an open-ended attempt at resolution.