Artist Statement 

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What is it which makes anything noticeable, visible?

My work cultivates conditions for observation, open attention. Waiting, suspending the habitual response, questioning through space, looking more carefully, moving while listening rather than saying, maintaining vulnerability, respect for matter.

Silence within duality. life and death, good and bad being interwoven.

I see it as an anti patriarchal approach for action, a suggestion for relation with all things.

 

When action is being concentrated in a specific area in space, while including that which was left empty, left behind, rather than denying it with the use of artificial stage facilities, so an energetic/ presence frame is being created, rather than a conceptual one. When I witness these moments, to me they seem cinematic, because time is being activated, allowing images to appear.  Manipulating the spectator's eye by the length and the angle of the performer's gaze, her skin and body texture, speed, orientation, manifesting the current of the  space - creating broadness, depth , height, manifesting volume, tenderly reclaiming the space, thus creating live and temporary architecture, to your eyes only.

 

Stimulating the unknown, subconscious, to appear through the live performance, and hopefully to exchange with the spectator. Inevitably being influenced by the audience's perception, attitude, and eyes. 

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“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”

 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

 

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Bio

 

Interdisciplinary performance artist, Based in Jerusalem.  Born in 1985 in Kaunas. At the age of 5 immigrated to Israel. Her artistic way was mostly influenced by the Butoh dance master and film maker Masaki Iwana (France-Japan). Berenika is exploring shifts in perception, the honesty of an instant, direct exchange with the spectator, out of the social daily realm. Many of her works are site specific. She has performed in Israel, France and Spain, often collaborating with artists from various disciplines. Alongside her artistic work, she is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Married and mother of two boys.