Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson
Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson (1984, Moscow) is a visual artist who examines cultural self-definition. Her nomadic anarchist aesthetics, influenced by her hybrid identity, explore displacement and integration through visualization of language. She associates a particular text to a place as an artistic modality, engaging in interventions and site-specific murals within public domains, museums, and galleries.
Language and typography are pivotal cultural components, signifying essence in both content and form. Ponizovsky Bergelson challenges linguistic rigidity by fusing diverse typography systems, fostering visual hybridity. Her works resist easy consumption and are reluctant to be deciphered. In them, the viewer experiences texts as a space of emotion and intent, in which word-images have more than one distinct identity and inherent meaning. Overlapping realities and time, the text takes a new form that reflects upon the simultaneity of the trivial and the life- (or world-) changing events of the present day.
Ponizovsky Bergelson’s notable interventions include; Venice Art Biennale; Jerusalem Biennale; Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Culture, Israel; Jaffa Museum; Klingspor Museum, Germany; Antique Toy Museum, Mexico; Kindl Brauerei, Berlin; and more.
Artworks
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This multidisciplinary installation features original confidential Israeli military maps from 1960, a video piece, a sound piece by sound artist Asaf Eden (a.k.a. Ryskinder), and an essay by historian Elad Oren. Combined they form a space of nostalgia and continuum that transcends time and place. Using techniques that embrace unpredictability, the work explores the tension between control and chaos during wartime, inviting reflection on fluid landscapes of identity, territory, and belonging in a constantly evolving world. The video piece is a haunting meditation on memory, displacement, and lost heritage, captured through the image of an ancient olive tree suspended between past and present. The sound piece creates a desolate sonic landscape where contemporary and historical contexts constantly flicker, while the essay presents a dialogue between textual fragments, offering an opposing interpretation of maps. Together, they construct a framework for understanding the potential meaning of representing a fantastical land through outdated woven topographic maps.