Nadav Assor: No Horizon

For years, Nadav Assor, who currently resides in the United States, has been returning to the Negev—the region where he grew up and which he surveys, scans, maps, and reimagines. The current exhibition brings together works by the artist from 2016 to the present, with a core focus on a new body of work titled "No Horizon," which presents an imagined, fragmented journey into a rock. Each work revolves around a different segment of a geological formation millions of years old. For the artist, the rock is not an inanimate object, but a living testament to ongoing, even dramatic, geological processes: "A continuous dance of the earth," he calls it. Entering into the rock is done through various points that the artist marks in the landscape, like gateways to the subterranean: a well in the Canaanite city of Tel Arad, the ruins of ‘Uza (Khirbat 'Azza) above Nahal Kina, phosphate mining fields in Nahal Zin, and more.

 

The path to these gateways reveals the scarred surface of the earth—scars left by humans that are no different from the scars human beings inflict on each other. The defacement of the surface appears in various forms, and Assor seeks it out, capturing and processing it through traditional documentation tools (still photography and video), more advanced technological means such as drones, and processing techniques that combine stop-motion animation with 3D animation and various AI systems. These tools translate what lies beneath the dug surface into a fantastic, cinematic, and speculative space.

 

Assor’s journey into the bowls of the earth, as depicted in his works, is based on geological logics of horizontality and stratification. However, he does not remain fixed to the concrete earth and rock but propels a creative process that is fictional and almost autonomous. Using generative AI and other digital tools, the artist sets in motion self-propelled processes, in which he must decide when to intervene.

 

The various journeys in Assor’s works trace subterranean spaces in search of a core, a black box. Simultaneously, they pass through several parallel timelines: first and foremost, Deep Time—geological, cosmic time. The time of earthquakes, the rising of mountains, and tectonic drift. It includes Mineral Time, the time of phosphorus (the element found in the continuously mined phosphates). Another temporality is revealed in the work "The Fish and the Morning Star"—that time of rocks and the fossilized fish embedded within them. The past of the fish is imagined in bright, glowing colors. 

 

The most recent time is that of humans, scars, and traces of the obsessive drawing from the earth—a logic of extraction that the artist seeks to reverse through the inward journey. On one of the inaccessible peaks of Mount Zin, the scanning drone uncovers the archaeology of a near-present: large stone inscriptions left by tourists, teenagers, and soldiers from commando units over the course of nearly fifty years. "To any place we want, by any path we choose," the soldiers of the Golani Commando carved there. The last time is the time of war.

 

Nadav Assor (b. 1979) grew up in the Negev and now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. He holds a BA from the Midrasha School of Art and an MA in Art from SAIC in Chicago. He currently teaches at Connecticut College and manages the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology. He is a partner in the open documentation lab at MIT. He works in installation, performance, sound, and video, creating multi-layered, fragmented, and physical audiovisual environments. He has won numerous awards and exhibited his works in exhibitions worldwide.

 

*The works were created during the artist’s residency at the Contemporary Art Center in Arad, as well as at the Artists' Studios in Jerusalem, with support from the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College. The exhibition is supported by the Independent Creators Fund of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.