To The Internal Libraries

Dear Hadassa, I am very excited to host you in the magazine, which began as a tribute to the act of leafing through books. Much of your artistic work over the past decade has been devoted to libraries and to viewing books as objects of knowledge, memory, passion, and love. Your book, To The Internal Libraries / Biblioscopia, which is now being published, was created in parallel with the exhibition currently on display at the National Library. The works bring together a process that took several years, during which you spent time with your camera in the old National Library while it was “preparing” to move to its new building. We'll talk about what the book does in relation to the exhibition in a moment, but first, I want to say that the way it is made is very indicative of the way it began. Nevertheless, as always, I will ask, how was the book born?

The excitement of this conversation is mutual, Shiraz. There are many similarities between the essence of your work and mine, and every conversation with you is always a deep dive. I am also very grateful for the spaces you create and preserve, and for your new book, which creates a space for discourse about your story and your relationship with your father in a way that is unparalleled and very healing.

To answer your question, the background for the book is actually my work over the last two decades. I often find myself involved in projects that involve creating archives for institutions, communities, or individuals. These archival materials include things that are often omitted from regular archives, even though I consider them very important. It always starts with observing human materials that are about to slip through our fingers and disappear. Often, there is no one to document them, or people give up on this option, or perhaps do not find it important.

In that moment of observation—of people, or works, or moments—I know what it takes to fight this leakage, and then I feel an urgency to create and to embark on a journey that leads to creation, but also stands on its own. And then, sometimes for years, I find myself trying, almost by force and against all logic, to create a container to hold these fleeting things. Many projects are accompanied by interviews—dozens or hundreds of hours of conversations—and it's wonderful when at least part of this archive becomes a book.

In the case of To the Internal Libraries, the exhibition stands on its own as a work of art and documentation, while the book contains other parts of the process and tells stories that are important to be told in the voices of the narrators—the voices of the National Library employees and of the rehabilitation doctor Dr. Efrat Suraqui, as well as two beautiful texts by Amitai Mendelsohn and Netta Assaf on infinite libraries and motherhood.

And, of course, every project over the years also reflects something from my life, from the things I am dealing with at the time. The book tells the big, concrete story of the emptying of the National Library, as well as a story of great pain and healing and what it takes to heal, both personally and collectively. Every project is always at least two works that somehow live together, side by side—the personal and the institutional, the communal and the expansive, and also the very private.

Because life is an image, and the image is life. Do you usually present them together?

The process of separating things is always a deciphering in itself, like an analysis. For example, alongside the project House of Life curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, which was exhibited in Venice, New York, and the Israel Museum, there was also the exhibition An Ocean Within an Ocean, curated by Sally Heptel Naveh and exhibited at the Artists' Studios in Jerusalem, which was filled with works that I had actually dreamed up while working on Venice.

The House of Life dealt with the Jewish community in Venice and, in a long conversation with retired captain Aldo Izzo, about life and fear of life, and An Ocean Within an Ocean dealt with my own young motherhood and observations of my mother's motherhood when she was my age in the 1980s, as well as a bit of postpartum depression, and the connection between motherhood and education that we pass down from generation to generation. There was a real split in these exhibitions.

It was precisely in the last project at the National Library and in the exhibitions To the Internal Libraries and Biblioscopy, which came out of this project, that the personal process I went through and the process of photographing inside the library became one and reflected each other. During the years I photographed the work, I suffered from severe chronic pain and underwent MRI scans in an attempt to diagnose the source of the pain and the difficulty I had walking. While undergoing the scans, I realized how to photograph the work in the Library—with the same objectivity and even the same rhythm as the MRI machine. Biblioscopy, which was exhibited at the Israel Museum, and To the Internal Libraries, are two parts of a very large body of work that deals with the Library and language, and of course with transitions and what is required in the process of healing, which is both personal and collective.

Let's talk for a moment about what you are presenting in the current exhibition, because you have created such a beautiful parallel: between photography in the National Library and the mechanics of body scanning, as in an MRI scan.

For years, I really wanted to photograph the old National Library building, which had ceiling conveyor belts and elevators that moved inside the storage rooms and carried every book that was ordered from the storage rooms to the reading rooms and back. I began this project by attempting to photograph inside these channels, because in my eyes, they were the physical embodiment of our collective subconscious. For decades, all the books, words, and letters that readers craved passed through these conveyor belts.

I began photographing the work in 2020, when the process of packing the books in preparation for the library's move to its new home was just getting started. While photographing, it became clear to me that the library, this wonderful archive that preserves everything, had hardly ever documented itself throughout its existence, and this was repeated during the recent move. Incidentally, this is similar to how those who care for others sometimes forget to care for themselves.

With this understanding, I found myself documenting the old National Library's storage rooms and their gradual emptying, as millions of books were transferred from the historic library building in Givat Ram to the impressive new building, located between the Knesset and the Israel Museum. This documentation was carried out in several ways. Part of it was filmed as a kind of tour of the library—a camera physically moving through the book conveyor system, the pneumatic tubes through which readers' call slips were sent, and the elevators that shuttled the books from the storage rooms to the reading rooms and back. Another part of the work also involved a kind of scanning of the storage areas at different stages and repeatedly: first when they were full, and then throughout the stages of their emptying.

I photographed this work over a period of about four years. The first part of the project was first presented in 2024 at the Israel Museum in an exhibition curated by Amitai Mendelsohn called Biblioscopia, which is a combination of the words “biblios,” book, and “scopia,” meaning observation.

The exhibition To the Internal Libraries, curated by Netta Assaf together with Karin Shabtai, and is currently on display in the National Library, contains a different and larger part of this body of work, including: the river of water that was unexpectedly discovered in what I perceived as the subconscious channels, the marks left by library workers among the shelves; a work that deals with the building itself as a physical, breathing entity; and a work that documents the process of emptying the library, alongside a kinetic installation composed of the actual conveyor belt, transforming it into a kind of scroll on the wall.

So, parallel to these two exhibitions, you realized that there was going to be a book. What struck me when I leafed through it was that you decided to almost completely forego including images from the video works. You essentially “cleaned” the book of the exhibition itself, leaving plenty of room for conversations with the librarians, the structure of the new library, and the knowledge that something was lost forever.

It's really not an exhibition catalog. The book stands on its own and is also a bit of a work of art in itself. As mentioned, it contains a small part of the archive that was created. It was very important for me to give space to the stories of the library staff who talk about the changes in the library's work processes over the years. Moshe Kanner talks about missing the interaction with readers, and Asher Kopchik talks about the excuses readers give for returning books late. Rivka Falk, the library guard, is an opera singer who talks about how her job as a guard is similar to her roles on stage; Hadar Levy, who works at the library, talks about missing his father, who was the library's lending manager, and more.

My work often focuses on the poetic realm, or the realm of the soul, if I may use that term, which is laden with religious and New Age connotations. Our soul is so essential to our life journey, yet we hardly ever talk about it. This is something I learned during my recovery process, and Dr. Suraqui talks about it at length in a conversation with her that appears in the book, which also tells the story of my recovery. Incidentally, I choose to talk about recovery at every opportunity, and certainly in the context of this project, because as someone who has suffered from physical pain for most of my adult life, I have never heard narratives of recovery, and certainly not of female recovery, and I think that now more than ever, we need to remember our most basic ability to heal and also to relate to ourselves—our soul, body, and mind—as no longer different fragments, but as a whole.

As human beings, we have bodies, but most of our life energy does not come from the body, or even from what we call the “mind,” but from other places. Our soul guides us in this world. It is what drives us. It knows with whom we have come to journey and change something for future generations. My exhibitions attempt to raise the discourse with this part of ourselves that we constantly push aside. The works are also a distillation of my intentions to repair what cannot be repaired. I am always happy to hear exhibition guides tell me about visitors' experiences and their surprise at the spiritual discourse that arises in them, which is a less talked-about discourse, certainly in the art world.

The conversations with the library staff are just the tip of the iceberg of the archive that was created during the work process and does not exist anywhere else, and is of great importance in itself—a reference to the soul of the library, to its old and crumbling body, alongside the body of knowledge it contains.

I had the privilege of working on this book with the wonderful designer Noa Schwartz, and together we sought—with Noa's great sensitivity—to strike a balance between the story of the library and my own story, and the idea of the library building as a physical body. Right up until it went to press, I kept removing more and more material in an attempt to balance the library's center of gravity with the personal story and the visual documentary material. The book is just the tip of the archive's iceberg, and the duplication is intentional. It's the tip of the iceberg, and I wanted it to feel that way.

Tell us a little about what didn't make it into the book.

For several years, I meticulously documented the storage areas, as well as the unique way in which the library staff decorated this space—they spent decades of their lives in the storage areas, and it shows. Only a small portion of the images and work practices I documented appear in the book alongside the conversations. The library employees maintained daily contact with readers, with the collection, with the transition to computerization, and more. Unfortunately, many wonderful interviews were left out of the book.

I installed a piece that was made up of an old fire warning system in the library. The piece is a reprogrammed version of that system- it is no longer a warning system but rather lights up in the order of which the workers remember the lights throughout the library turning on each morning and then closing in the end of each working day in the old building. In the exhibition, it was reprogrammed to warn, or rather not to warn. That is, to tell other things.

You said earlier that this work is closely related to your personal story. What is the “parallel” or “inner” story?

It's a matryoshka doll of stories. There is a story about how, throughout the filming of the work, I was very ill, and at the end of the filming, I had recovered from the chronic pain I suffered from for many years. And there is the story about how I am named after my great-grandmother, a writer who was murdered in the Holocaust. Her name was Esther, but in religious families, women were not allowed to be writers, so her pen name was Hadassa. Maybe her writings were published, but I don't know where they are, and they have never been found. When I wandered around the basement floors of the library, I kept thinking that maybe they were there somewhere among the files. There was an area in the library where I was convinced they were, and every time I went down to the storage rooms, I hoped I might find them.

It's interesting, both of my parents, each in a very different way, dedicated so much care to preserving stories from getting lost. My father is a filmmaker, and my mother is a filmmaker, writer, editor, and lecturer. 

The birth of my son was also reflected for me in the library building, which to me seemed a very feminine space. I searched the doctoral theses section for the theses of my partner and my mother. And I thought a lot about my other grandmother, who had fled the riots in the Old City of Jerusalem and survived, and about houses that suddenly disappear into flight, into war. The task of capturing a home in motion, of capturing an archive, is an impossible task, trying to hold on to something that is fading away. When I was studying at Bezalel Academia, I used to work together with my grandmother, Nechama, and the teachers even knew about it. They would say, “This grade is half yours and half your grandmother’s.”

This project actually began during the coronavirus pandemic and continued into October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. You describe a constant state of transition, which is interesting because the entire exhibition in the library depicts movement in transitions. In the book, you and designer Noa Schwartz created a constant movement between the floors of the library. You essentially “packaged” this transition within the building, into the structure of a book. I am essentially leafing through the structure. How does all this relate to your preoccupation with pain?

Noa and I thought about the book in the context of the architecture of the library building. There really is a transition between the scanned maps of the library floors. She had the wonderful idea of giving each interview and conversation in the book its own Dewey number (a library cataloging system).

And as for pain, yes, transition, transformation, crisis—all those words. As the daughter of divorced parents, I was “trained” to try to hold on to both ends. The book includes a conversation with Dr. Suraqui, an expert on coping with pain, who was my rehabilitation doctor. She says in our conversation that in Western society we like to achieve results and climactic moments, but the truth is that most of our lives are not weddings, births, and deaths—they are some kind of transition, a journey. We want to “fast forward,” like in a movie, to get “there” already. But most of the time, we are in a long transition between one state and another, like walking in the desert. In fact, we need to train ourselves to feel comfortable in these transitions: between ages, between physical and emotional states, between seasons.

In our ultra-modern lives today, the pace of transitions is not attuned to the body or the soul. For example, flying in an airplane is harsh on the body. And the same is true when we move between stories on Instagram—between the Holocaust and rebirth, between a terrorist attack and a video of a cat. Nothing is attuned to the rhythm of the soul. The time we are living in now is a time of transition, between the previous collective identity of the people and this place, and our future identity. And transition is an act of sorting and clarification, of deciding what we will preserve and what we will discard. This transition cannot be rushed; there is no “come on, let's get it over with.” The real pace at which we should operate is, in my opinion, similar to the pace of the conveyor belt at the exhibition. Such decisions cannot be made in a hurry. The pain of this time makes one want to “flee” but I believe this impulse is only apparent. The opportunity here is what happens when I observe and listen to the past.

Incidentally, what you are saying, the conversations in the book refer a lot, surprisingly, to chaos. We think of a library as something so organized, where we know where every book is. But it seems almost the opposite. The book suggests that maintaining a library is an act of constantly coping with chaos and with “eternity,” which sets unreasonable standards. This made me think of Mierle Laderman Ukeles's “Maintenance Manifesto” and your shared observation about the costs of maintenance and care, and within that, of course, the role of women in this Labor / Art.

It's amazing that you say that! Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a very significant artist for me and very dear to my heart. I also had the privilege of meeting her in person. The story of how we met is funny. Twelve years ago, she visited my studio at the Artists' Studios in Jerusalem. I was so excited that I said, “I can't believe you're here, you're my ancestor.”

She is truly a brilliant, ageless woman, and I have been in constant dialogue with her and her work for many years—about motherhood and endless maintenance, and the corrective action required of us as artists, as well as the meanings of choosing this type of artistic action. A profound and beautifully made film about her was released recently, and I am grateful that it exists, giving voice to her story and work in all their depth and complexity.

In the same context, there is an image that has accompanied me throughout my life, originating in a dream I had in my early adolescence. I dreamed it was the middle of the night, and I had to build an endless tower out of countless pieces, like the Eiffel Tower. A thousand little pieces in a dark room. And if I did not complete the task by the end of the night... everything would disappear.

I live with this image. I try to believe that there is time, and that some things are meant to disappear. And yet, again and again, I put myself in situations where I am responsible for preservation.

You called the exhibition To the Internal Libraries, and now that name is becoming clear in all its glory. Our soul knows what to take forward and what to let go of, what to build and what to destroy. In the book, you talk to Dr. Soraqui about coping with physical pain, which may be a consequence of this “responsibility,” or perhaps correlates with the amount of weight you carry at any given moment.

In order to heal from years of pain, I had to sort through the stories of my life, what motivates me, what hurts me, what things I do simply out of an attempt to avoid pain, and what I am willing to let go of in order to heal, so as not to pass on my pain and the price of that pain to my children.

Part of the current collective pain we are experiencing is related to our disconnection from ourselves, our unwillingness to let go of our pain. Pain serves us in our current identity, and if we let it go, we will be forced to develop a new and updated identity, which is frightening. Change—shedding a previous identity and building something new—is one of the most frightening things one can do, because in the transition between identities, there is a period of emptiness, of uncertainty, and large systems do not like change. For me, the period after rehabilitation, when for the first time in my adult life I was free of physical pain, was one of the most complex periods of my life. Everything I knew about myself, everything I knew from all the relationships in my life, had to be rebooted. There were things in this new identity that no longer fit and had to change.

In my conversation with Dr. Suraqui, she talks about how great pain requires us to stop and return to our “internal libraries.” That is, to look at what is essential to us. If there were no pain, I would remain in the same comfortable state, unchanged, without development. Pain requires us to change, to reinvent ourselves in ways that challenge us as individuals and also collectively. We are required to let go of what does not belong in our future operating system.

This is a radical claim made by the book and the exhibition, especially when it comes to a structure filled with symbolic capital, institutionalism, and stateliness, which was opened during wartime.

In the old library building, there are still things that were decided to be left behind. They are scattered there in the basements. Every transition involves a choice of narrative that guides the sorting process. How many parallel stories can be told about our identity from the materials left behind? It becomes like a negative image, in the same sense Foucault talks about in Madness and Civilization, about observing what society chooses to ostracize from within itself as something that defines it. The stories we choose to forget or make others forget are probably the most important. Every library is made up of countless previous libraries, and it's interesting to see what's left out.

We cannot end our conversation without returning to your internal library of artist's books. You have made so many, and we haven't really talked about them at all, but fortunately, some of them have already been indexed on the website and can be browsed. What was the first artist's book you made?

Perhaps because of the name my mother gave me, after my grandmother, the writer, there is a part of me that feels that I was actually meant to write and not to make art. My mother has been writing prose and editing for as long as I can remember, and I've always gone back and forth between writing and art, feeling a bit torn between the two. In terms of scenery, I have synesthesia, and I experience reading and letters as very three-dimensional material, and even as something with taste. Many years ago, when I traveled to the US for a semester exchange program, which turned into seven years and two degrees in art, I discovered the world of artist's books at the Rhode Island School of Design, and it was a revelation and a correction for me. Finally, I could connect all the worlds.

My first books, which of course embarrass me a little today, were related to space, very sculptural, and also attempted to fix things that cannot be fixed. In recent years, almost all of my work has been related to language and letters, and there is no longer any need to choose. Perhaps as we mature, we return to ourselves, to our most inner core issues. This is also part of healing.

For a woman who moves from one place to another, a book is something you can take with you everywhere.

Exactly. This is also interesting in the context of local art, in the sense that the wandering Jew did not have access to a studio, but always had books. It is also interesting how much of the visual language of Israeli art was constructed in dialogue with language, text, and letters. Letters are raw material, and not just a medium that carries meaning; that's something that is evolutionarily embedded in Jewish identity.

To whom did you dedicate the book?

I am surrounded by avid library goers. My partner, Jonatan, who is a Kabbalah researcher and spent years in the National Library; my two daughters, who have been writing poetry and stories since forever; my little boy, who draws letters and looks for them everywhere; and my mother, who also co-edited the book, and from whom I inherited my love of books, letters, words, and libraries. When she was pregnant with me, she wrote scripts on a typewriter, and to this day, the sound that calms me most deeply is the sound of typing.

Making a book is like...

Writing a letter to someone, which is not dependent on time, it will reach the person it needs to reach, when it needs to reach them.

Who should we invite to the magazine?

The artists Einat Arif Galanti and Raya Bruckenthal. Each of them has been trying to fix reality on a different level over the past two years, and in ways that are also impossible. I feel calmer living in this crazy world thanks to what they create, and the photographer Daniel Tchechik, who is constantly on the road.