Back Jenny Birger’s Impressions Following “Exposed in the Studio”- A Joint Evening by Nir Vidan and Tamar Sofia Kisch – Creative Writings

Jenny Birger
09.10.2025

Jenny Birger’s Impressions Following “Exposed in the Studio”- A Joint Evening by Nir Vidan and Tamar Sofia Kisch

I’ll start by saying that I love watching works presented in a studio. My eyes delight in the soft rawness of a piece shown in its home, without the wrapping of a large, sophisticated production. The scarcity of means allows other qualities to surface and to touch the audience in a more intimate and direct way. “Exposed in the Studio” is a wonderful example of an evening featuring two very different works that speak to one another and connect beautifully: “Assembly Instructions” by Nir Vidan, and “The Silence of the Sirens” by Tamar Sofia Kisch. It’s an intriguing, rich evening that addresses all of the senses and reveals a broad range of contemporary dance creation through two solos, choreographed and performed by the artists themselves.

 

Assembly Instructions / Nir Vidan

Nir stands with his back to us, wearing a black shirt and short black pants. He turns his head from right to left with increasing speed; what looks like reading lines of invisible words quickly becomes a powerful act of refusal. At times his movement syncs with the techno beat playing in the background, and at others he deliberately breaks away from it. A strong and courageous opening, the “yes” of creation begins with shouting the word “no.” I feel that this opening accurately reflects our lives here in Israel in recent years. The firm refusal and the shaking of the head from side to side are not blind denial but a grounded, physical resistance, the “no” serving as a potent engine.

The shaking intensifies, surpassing the BPM limits of the track. My eyes can’t keep up with the image before me, and magic occurs in front of me: I see Nir’s right and left ears simultaneously in profile. My eyes deceive me, conjuring strange, distorted images, like those in the paintings of Picasso or Bacon, blending multiple perspectives on a single canvas. The shaking continues, overtakes Nir’s whole body, brings him to the floor, twists him, leads him through the space almost in surrender. A trance, or perhaps an exorcism, that keeps generating optical illusions and challenging my perception. The title “Assembly Instructions” implies there’s something disassembled that one wishes to reassemble, and indeed, already in these first minutes, I see Nir as the sum of separated parts, unable to perceive the whole.

The tremor subsides. Nir stands again, his back to us, on surprisingly firm and thin legs. I imagine myself attempting something similar, I’d be flat on the floor in seconds, dizzy and graceless. In his fragile-looking, skeletal body there is inner power, a stable core now fully on display.

His arms cross in front of his body and invade one another’s space, the left arm reaching right, the right reaching left. The hands sneak behind his back, as if they were foreign hands, and start pulling his shirt upward, revealing his skin. Another optical illusion that brings with it a question of ownership: whose hands are these? Where is Nir, and is he consenting? And, if not, how could he resist?

The hands keep lifting the shirt, uncovering his back and then covering his head, which will remain covered until the end of the performance (I’ll return to this later). The discomfort grows as those same foreign hands slide to the waistline and lower the elastic of his shorts below his buttocks. To look or not to look, to gaze or avert, but where to? The empty stage offers no escape. Nir traps us in that mix of embarrassment and curiosity, as the hands start moving the buttocks, and again my eyes get confused, what I see loses its usual meaning and becomes something else, something new. The bare bottom becomes material in the hands of the creator, literally, continuing to dismantle my ability to perceive fully and coherently what I see.

The foreign hands invade the space between the legs and begin to move Nir backward in deliberate steps, curving his back. A fragile, erotic, and unsettling moment, and again I wonder: where is Nir in this picture? Are his hands listening to him, or do they have a will of their own? Images of war and bodily invasion make watching even harder. It’s a powerful and disturbing sequence, and again, there’s nowhere to run. Maybe just to close one’s eyes, or pull a shirt over one’s head, in solidarity with the performer.

 

 

Visual and somatic, Nir’s research takes us on a journey into the many ways of dismantling his body’s form into foreign, strange shapes, into both recognizable images and new ones with laws of their own. The cool lighting and soundtrack by Tomer Damsky create a charged atmosphere. The methods of estrangement are many and they are extremely effective; there’s hardly a moment when I feel I’m seeing “a person” in the usual sense of the word. Nir’s research is at once archaeological and political, and it’s executed with impressive skill.

The head movement at the start, the choice of black clothing, and the exploration of self-disassembly all inevitably bring me to the canonical work Self Unfinished by Xavier Le Roy. Le Roy uses black clothing to create a multiplicity of meanings that shift at dizzying speed, immediately recognizable and interpretable, as can be seen in the excerpt linked below. In Nir’s work, aside from a few moments where the black clothes serve as meaning-generating tools, I sense they function more as a way to erase unnecessary information, to hide and obscure what need not be at the forefront.

 

Since the clothes remain on him throughout, the shirt mostly above his head and the shorts below the buttocks, a question that crept into my mind early on grew stronger as time passed: Why are the clothes there at all? Is there a desire to expose or to hide, or perhaps both? My imagination begins to paint a parallel performance, happening simultaneously, identical except that it’s performed in full nudity. It might sound like a voyeuristic fantasy, but to me it feels like a natural conclusion drawn from the work itself. If the body is a pure, simple raw material, with mass, texture, color, and weight, there’s no difference between the bare buttocks and the eyelid masked by the shirt; they are equals.

About a decade ago, I found a pile of fashion magazines discarded on a Tel Aviv street. One of them was ACNE PAPER, and that issue was devoted entirely to exploring the human body in art and fashion photography. A central article focused on American photographer Bill Durgin, whose works strikingly resemble Nir’s. He too investigates the possibilities of dismantling the human body using clever angles and unusual poses. The nudity in his photographs feels necessary and natural, almost inevitable, as in classical sculpture or painting.

 

The imagined piece in my mind continued to unfold alongside the real one, allowing me to make eye contact with the artist, to feel: the embarrassment, shame, pride, concealment, and brave exposure. I continued watching the two works simultaneously, one real and one imagined. Nir’s meticulous, precise movement material is beautifully crafted, perfectly tailored to his body. Every bone expresses a whole world; every small motion has weight. And yet, when I think of the title “Assembly Instructions”, I feel the glue that connects the parts is missing. For me as a viewer, that glue is the human, emotional, soft, shared element, the possibility of eye contact, even if only for brief moments. Perhaps “Disassembly Instructions” would be a more fitting name for my experience – which was a fascinating, different and skillfully crafted work made of the finest raw materials.

 

The Silence of the Sirens / Tamar Sofia Kish

Every attempt I made to write about this work linearly, through words that form sentences and paragraphs, failed. This failure, to me, testifies to the success of the artist, who seeks to explore the tension between the fleeting, undefinable movement of the living body and its fixed, defined image through photography and documentation. This time, the words wanted to arrange themselves differently, so I let them.

*

Ripples

Fingertips meet the water.
Water meets the light.
Light meets my eyes.
A chain of quiet encounters.
Like a haiku,
a flood of emotion contained in only a few words.

The fingers stir the wall before me,
sculpting in hard matter
without moving a single brick.
Almost without sweat.

*

A half-full, transparent tub of water.
I wonder if Tamar will dive into it.
And whether something will happen,
a small miracle, or just an optical illusion.
We’ll wait and see.

*

The camera stands ready,
its lens fixed.
It begins to carve the infinite stream of time into fragments.
Each click is a small explosion.
A ticking bomb collecting moments
from the blur,
from the chaos.

Its rhythm, cruel and mechanical,
decides what will remain in memory
and what will fade
into the endless world of unnoticed things.
A world that exists beside real life,
but has no path leading back to it.

*

 

Tamar moves impulsively and repetitively.
Her rhythm answers the camera’s.
Her body meets the ground with the gentleness needed to go on,
yet the force reverberates through my bones.
The camera misses it, of course.
What does softness look like?

*

I want to know how the still images will look.
But look, it’s here,
a voice inside me whispers.
It’s happening right now, before your eyes.
What more do you need?

Still, I can’t help wondering.
Will there be a projection at the end?
Polaroid souvenirs?
Merchandise of selected moments?
Will my memory fall short of the camera’s,
or perhaps
the camera remembers
nothing at all?

*

The dancer’s movement devours the space around her,
driven by an inner voltage,
a current you can almost hear.
The images change too quickly.
A bowl of water becomes
a very short pregnancy,
documented, of course.

*

She returns to the tub,
and I wonder if it’s dangerous,
this meeting of water
and electricity.
But it’s fine.

*

Her wet, heavy hair drives the movement through space.
Her open mouth with the speaker, or was that before?
Perhaps not. The camera will know.

Her mouth wide open, releasing a voice not her own,
sometimes swallowed by the movement of her body.
A brilliant, mesmerizing image.
A wide arc of expression
face and body intertwined
surprise tangled with a silent scream
and a pain beyond description.

I salute her jaws for their devotion,
holding the speaker for so long,
never letting slip
by accident
a single misplaced word.

She dives into the tub,
not as I imagined,
but as she imagined.

Her wet, heavy hair pulls her toward the wall.
Ripples scatter in every direction.
The white wall changes color.
Softens.
Surrenders
to the unstoppable flow.

Exposed in the Studio- a joint evening by Nir Vidan and Tamar Sofia Kisch (both of whom have been artists in residency at the studio of Yasmeen Godder Company in the passing year) took place on September 25 and 26, 2025.