Exhibition: The
Space, the Period, the Comma, the Twenty-Two Letters

Winner of the 2021 Miron Sima Prize for the Visual Arts
Curator: Hadas Maor 2021
The Artists’ House Jerusalem

Syllables, 2021
Wood, black paint

16 identical units attached to the walls,
8 on each side, mirroring each other,
resembling shelves in a library.
Dimensions of each unit : 3x33x198 cm

3 autonomous units, Inspired by the DNA and RNA structure.
Dimensions: 3x66x198 cm,
3x66x132 cm

Floor Plan, 2021
Wood, black paint

8 identical units recline on the floor,
organized according to a library shelving plan.
Dimensions of each unit : 3x33x165 cm

The Library, 2021
Video, 2k anamorphic
12:50 min

Renana Aldor's exhibition, presented on the occasion of her winning the 2021 Miron Sima Visual Arts Award, revolves around the library in the historic building of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. The library, whose design has not changed since its establishment in the 1970s, houses academic research literature in social sciences and humanities, and appears in Aldor's work through various models of representation, as a spatial, conceptual, and emotional labyrinth.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "The Library of Babel,"1 which describes an immense, possibly infinite universe (aka the Library), composed of hexagonal galleries connected by narrow hallways. Four sides of each hexagon are lined with five shelves, with thirty-two books of uniform format on each shelf. Each book contains four hundred and ten pages, with forty lines of approximately eighty characters each. The vast library contains all possible combinations of the twenty-five orthographical symbols: twenty-two letters, comma, period, and space.

As if striving to regulate a state of disorder, to calm a state of unrest, Aldor shifts between different categories of action, and reorganizes the space by combining direct visual representations with symbolic and even conceptual representations. In the video work, the library appears as an emptied, still spectral space in which only the figure of the librarian moves and operates. The work is not narrative in the classical sense; it is constructed as a successive weave of images offering a reflection on the interrelations between time, space, and body. The drama arises from the suspension of time and from minor and enigmatic occurrences, and it is not entirely clear whether the camera is tracing the librarian or rather searching for the library's core. The lingering, continuous, endless movement of the camera reveals the space of the library, but at the same time elicits a restrained tension, conveying foreboding overtones. This movement, in turn, generates a shift between different cinematic genres, blurring the seemingly obvious reading of the work.

The installation, which is split between the two additional spaces of the exhibition, departs from the specific library to examine modes of organizing knowledge. The elements comprising it appear modular and repetitive. The basic shape of the vertebral structures scattered throughout the space resembles "letters," which are constructed of connected lines, with what appear like sculptural punctuation marks embedded in them. The dispersal of the elements in the space refers to the architectural plan of the building, and to the library's shelving plan, which seem to be reflected in each other. Thus, not only does the exhibition address the concept of the library; it is literally made up of letters, words, and potential sentences, which converge and disperse in the space, alternately constructed and deconstructed.

The viewer's movement between the exhibition spaces seems to generate another layer of meaning, as it embodies movement between a real space and a photographed space, between a physical sense of actually entering the photographed library space and the careful movement between the elements that make up the skeletal structure of the imaginary space.

In Borges's aforementioned story and in other stories, such as "On Exactitude in Science," he delves into the aspiration for total identity between signifier and signified and the desire to eliminate the built-in discrepancy between them. But while in Borges's case this leads to a conceptual collapse—for a situation in which the library contains every possible book (or one in which the map covers all of its reference area), is also a situation in which it contains no books at all, because it is no longer a library, but the world itself—in Aldor's case, the tension between the two remains active as an open potential in the space. in a state of continuous, infinite reverberation; a situation in which the viewer can continue to move on and on.

Text by Hadas Maor

Installation Images by Elad Sarig

Renana Aldor

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