Born, Never Asked, 2021, Installation

Solo Exhibition, Jerusalem Artists House, Curated by Nira Pereg (Photo: Elad Sarig)

Born, Never Asked* // Text by Nira Pereg

Shir Handelsman was born without asking to be born and without being asked. This is how I first encountered him, in the work Born (2017), moving from screen to screen, restrained but restless, resting momentarily in his father's lap, and immediately standing up and leaving the frame. A tenth of a second later he reappears in an identical scene, on another screen. But where does he suspend himself between the screens?

Handelsman is present in most of the frames as an "anti-hero," yet his presence is not miserable; it does not question why it exists, but repeatedly examine how to formulate its existence. Rather than an alienating distance, it is containing, hosting, as if telling us: you and I and all of us are subjects, and it is only by chance that I am an object for you here.

From this "anti-hero" stance, I construe his aesthetic manifestations: meticulous, precise, even ostentatious. They envelop the question of realism or anti-realism and sustain it. Shir's "aesthetic" is the bacterial setting in which the "anti-hero" can transpire in an eternal object/subject state. This "aesthetic" is the crutch used by Shir; it is the apparatus.

In his works in the exhibition "Born, Never Asked", Handelsman introduces a parallel apparatus. The mechanized sculpture Stress Fractures comprises a 200-kg limestone, adorned with five hammers that constantly hack at it. To be precise, each hammer hits it once every 10 seconds. The hewing is insignificant, and barely damages the object, but it certainly tries its utmost, and perhaps—Shir warns us, apologetically—"it will leave a thin layer of dust on the floor."

The video piece Who owns the sun? is screened in the space concurrent to the sculpture. Handelsman's home becomes the scene of action for his entire world: miraculous natural phenomena take place in his living room, bedroom, and bathroom. He harnesses the natural forces precisely in the shadow of a pandemic, in which solitude and isolation are supposed to ensure our existence.

Installation view, Jerusalem Artists House, 2021 (Video by Daniel Hanoch)

Who owns the sun?, 2021, HD Video, 8:45 min (Preview)

Stress Fractures, 2021, Video Documentation