KHEN SHISH

RB: You are always so poetic, I would like to start with your thoughts on the poem that Yonit Naaman dedicated to you, where the eye is a recurring motif: “Just one thwacking visual haze / against the window where her eyes gaze. / She saw. She understood. Deepening the depth, / she closed her eyes and beheld plenty / and gold. / She was brimming / with gold.”

KS: I get the place of gold and seeing. I told Yonit about the time I went to this area in London, where there are all these immigrants from India and Pakistan, which had all these shops full of gold. But not like the shops we know here or in Europe, where there’s a few modest pieces of jewelry – everything was bursting with gold. I was literally dazzled. That gold was like some kind of a physical blinding in the world, but also blindness in the face of the boundless extravagance and the question: Is it gold or gold-colored? Is it real? Are there karats or not? So, the poem talks about this place, about one of my adventures with gold, which I shared with her. This poem was dedicated to a piece I titled: Sparkling Street, What’s There to Say. When I was in London, all of a sudden I realized that even in London, which seems so cosmopolitan and has everything, it too has these ghettos. Suddenly you come across this Pakistani or Indian ghetto. And they continue to bring their own culture, with such intensity, like gushing rivers. So much so, that you can no longer tell if it is kitsch or if it touches on something sacred. Where’s the line?

RB: This experience of being dazzled is actually excess, too much light comes in, the eye is flooded, it can no longer see. Does it see so much that it no longer sees? In your art too, gold and eyes have been a part of your work for decades.

KS: I find it interesting, because for me, the eye is also the shape of the sun, at least the pupil. The sun can burn but it can also create photosynthesis, or in other words – life. The place that burns is the place whose boundaries are not always clear to us, and it can be alive. Once again, I think back to the gold, the display case with all the gold, which itself was dazzling, reflecting the sunlight, and you don’t know what to do anymore. I came from all this abundance, I came from a culture of excess, I underwent a transformation, and then suddenly, in Europe of all places, I returned to it.

RB: Ruti Direktor wrote about the significance of eyes in your work almost twenty years ago. Already then, she touched on the history of the motif in your art: “In the past ten or fifteen years, during which Shish’s artistic language evolved, an image bank has crystallized repeating itself over and over in different incarnations: flowers with drooping inflorescence, trees whose roots are in the air, upside down crowns, reclining hearts, light bulbs and sun, birds’ legs, leaves that are also tears that are also nooses, horses […] the image most present in her works – present, metamorphosed, reemerging in the form of another image: the eye. Eyes. Countless eyes.” (1) In retrospect, the eye not only remained present, it evolved: from source to image, from image to symbol, and now the eye has turned into the very format of the painting. Is the painting an eye?

KS: As early as my first work, back in 1994, I presented two aluminum containers with water flowing into them. When I was asked in art crit: "Why is there water here?" I said: “It’s not water, those are tears, and these are two eyes that perpetually cry over their lives, their history, their past, what once was and must be erased to become something else.” I had to erase who I am, my history, the Arabic language with which I grew up, and all sorts of other biographical markers, and the way we grew up – in poverty, in all sorts of places. I had to wash away everything to feel comfortable sitting on the lawn at Oranim campus.

RB: That is not washing, that’s crying.

KS: At first, the containers wept. After the containers, I made pupils. I thought about how the paper could actually look back at me, and the viewer who looks at my works also looks back at me. In fact, art is never just one pair of eyes; there are always many pairs of eyes looking, like in cartoons, where everything is dark and suddenly you see these glowing eyes. The eyes are a type of sun, a flash, something that cracks the darkness.
The eye is the most basic thing. You can do all sorts of things without body parts, God forbid, but you can’t paint without eyes. That is the only body part that is really essential to a painter, more than hands. You have to have eyes, otherwise, if you can't be critical about your action, then it isn't painting, not really. It can be an act of painting, but not painting.

RB: Meaning, the eye is a means of reviewing the quality of the painting or reviewing the gaze?

KS: We have to protect our eyes. They protect us. It is crucial to choose what you see, and what you don’t see. For instance, there are films that I start watching and then turn off, because I tell myself that I need to protect my eyes. It is not only the external eye, it’s the inner eye. What my soul will wake up with in the morning.

RB: Apropos the protective eye, I want to mention that themes like the evil eye, superstitions, and amulets are often brought up in the context of your art.

KS: In 2007, I exhibited the painting The Maiden and the Crow at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion – a giant maiden with lots of eyes above her, which looked more like boats, clouds, huge black eyes. I was asked about it at the time, and answered that they are actually protecting eyes. True, she has an eagle, either pecking or kissing her cheek, and she has an X over her mouth, but, as far as I am concerned, thanks to the eyes, she has protection. Divine providence. I always said that I grew up in a never-ending performance. On Tisha B’Av [Ninth of Av fast], for instance, my mom used to put pebbles under our pillows, in memory of the destruction of the Temple. During the Hebrew month of Nisan, Tunisians place green leaves on the mirrors and the paintings hanging in the house. Lettuce leaves and olive branches fell out of every cupboard you opened, for a green year, for a new and renewed year. Lots and lots of leaves. My mom really held on to the Tunisian tradition and she also used almost biblical Hebrew. So that’s how I grew up, in a never-ending visual performance, in hyper-visuality. Everything is visual, everything in the world is physical.

RB: Rituality also offers a physical space to spiritual elements – you mentioned providence, faith, the evil eye.

KS: Yes. I remember, for example, when I broke up with my boyfriend in my teens, my mother performed a “bakhoor.” She burned some minerals with cloves, like you do with sage to purify your home. The solutions were very rudimentary. There weren’t many medicines either. After my daughter Tamar was born, my mom would always tell me that the most important thing was to get vaccinated. She said that she did not have medicine, so they held on to beliefs, and she really did have deep faith, “but you,” she told me, “don’t have the strong blind faith, like me. You – you went through a lot of filters along the way.”

RB: Faith is blind, it has no eyes. Do you paint so many eyes because you don’t have blind faith?

KS: I don’t have blind faith in anything. You have to understand what you are doing, you have to see what you are doing. Seeing is knowing.

RB: In the Garden of Eden, eating from the Tree of Knowledge opened Eve and Adam’s eyes, and brought not only knowledge, but also sin and shame.

KS: In art, I open my eyes before eating from the Tree of Knowledge, otherwise it stands in the way of painting. This is the place where the hand knows before the head understands, this is the intuitive place and you must not interfere with it. “Talent” is actually seeing things in their inception. Stripping them of themselves. Art is also truth.

RB: Not only do you open your eyes, you also open eyes for the painting.

KS: My art is biographical. In the paintings of the giant eye, the painting became an eye, the eye became a whole world, and I feel that in this series, I became an eye. I no longer care about the black eyes in the dark, about the criticism. After a journey that spanned three decades, I know how to look by myself. Look at the big eyes, they have an inner world inside their pupils.

RB: The eye became a world.

KS: In the same painting, you see your world and I see mine. We will never be in the same place. Ultimately, everyone has a place and everyone has his or her own inner world. But even in the eyes, even in the pupils, I see lots and lots of eyes. Basically, everything there is eyes. What’s in the eye, other than the obvious, which are tears?

RB: It’s obvious there are tears?

KS: Whenever I paint an eye, I automatically tap the brush on the paper or canvas a couple of times to make tears. There can’t be an eye that doesn’t have a tear, because for me the eye is, before anything else, water. It has water, it has a fount in it; it is wet. When I look at people, I don’t see an eye without tears. Every person I look at – I see their tears. In every person in the world, the eye is in a river. I don’t know how people don’t see that. Can’t you see that the eye is glistening? That it is moist? That it is in water? That’s obvious. We have become accustomed to seeing the eye, but our initial gaze is through water, through tears. I look at you and I see that.

RB: That is a touching observation. Every person sees and observes the world through their tears.

KS: Through their sorrow.

RB: And when the eye is a world, this is a gaze through the sorrow of the world.

KS: That’s why you have to protect the eye.

RB: You see something in your mind’s eye, it’s wonderful. And when you see it outside with your eyes, through tears, it’s disheartening.

KS: You have to protect your eye, protect your soul. You don’t go through every open door. You know there’s a chance you’ll be disappointed. We talked about the Tree of Life. Sorrow is the essence of what comes from the Tree of Knowledge, eating the apple or the awakening, enlightenment, or gaining wisdom. In fact, this is already the place of the sorrow of the world.