Karam Natour

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship in – 2020

The 2020 Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship, established by Anselm Kiefer, is awarded to the artist Karam Natour for expanding performative practice from the establishment of a subject responding to the effectiveness of pre-organized orders of knowledge to the creation of personal and fictional spatial and temporal dimensions. Natour’s works raise the question of how one can navigate between objective epistemic arguments about specific fields of knowledge and their human and subjective constitution. This question positions art in its ethical role: exposing mechanisms of knowledge and assigning responsibility to viewers in shaping their own worldviews.

Karam Natour (born 1992) is a multidisciplinary creator working in drawing, digital printing, video, and performance. His performative works explore the production of knowledge systems emerging from the tension between mental states, the construction of representational languages, and physical actions. Natour’s works expose prevailing worldviews and images as fragile constructions, reliant on the subject that forms them and on the relationship between the artist and his communities. Thus, our understanding of reality and our participation in the construction of knowledge systems align with two distinct paradigms that Natour presents in an intentionally inconsistent manner. The first is objective, rooted in semiotic and scientific representations; the second is subjective, where our actions and experiences create realities in an unmediated fashion.

Natour uncovers the illusory Natoure of self-perception, which assumes complete alignment between linguistic instructions and their real-world applications, between consciousness and our understanding of it, between rationality and our tendencies toward prejudice, error, and humor, and between the fluid, ever-changing ethical, aesthetic, and political foundations that underpin complex identities.

These explorations highlight the ontological distinction between two modes of existence. The first depends on subjective experiences such as laughter, pain, and embarrassment, as seen in his works Nothing Personal (2017) and Heat in My Head (2018). The second relies on the identification of objects in the world, such as the sun, earth, and moon, as in his work Come Back After Me (2018). This latter work examines the elusive and unstable Natoure of spoken and written language, whose meanings shift within the cultural contexts of Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Natour composes semiotic sentences and “rule-following statements” (as Ludwig Wittgenstein termed them) alongside physical actions and performative speech acts. The first category engages with the depths of a priori laws that govern meaning-making, while the second, lacking prior knowledge, constructs the order of meaning through the singularity of each performance.

From these performances, Natour derives cartographies of imaginative knowledge, inventing cosmologies that reflect a world created by the artist. This is exemplified in his digital prints, including Genesis, Sun, Saturn, Venus (2018), and Water (2020).

Shai-Lee Horodi

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship in – 2024

The Kiefer Prize for 2024 is awarded to the artist Shai-Lee Horodi in recognition of her interactive work, which encourages audiences toward self-reflection and activates them to create new representations.

Shai-Lee Horodi, born in 1993, completed her undergraduate studies at the School of Art in Musrara (2013), the Faculty of Arts–HaMidrasha at Beit Berl College (2015), and her master’s studies at Northwestern University in Illinois (2019). Horodi is an interdisciplinary artist whose performative works explore the methods and boundaries of knowledge construction in relation to technology, the human body, and its senses. Through internal introspection, she examines the limits of her body and its abilities, and through external interaction, she involves the audience in the act of creation.

The gap between sensory experience and the cogito, between the physical sense organs and their interpretation, and between the audience’s actions and carefully planned technological scenarios—these elements form, for Horodi, an aesthetic space of seduction. Within this space, she and the audience actively create visual content as well as specific, temporal narratives. Many of her works rely fundamentally on the participation of spectators, who produce captivating displays through their active and effective engagement with creations based on digital interfaces, sound systems, cameras, vision devices, video games, and puzzles.

For Horodi, the artwork functions as the infrastructure for dynamic interactions between herself and the viewers. These infrastructures feature focused and critical themes that question the sensory and cognitive boundaries of perception on one hand, and the mechanisms of meaning-making on the other. Her works belong to the field of the psychology of perception, examining the artistic medium as a mode of human cognition. Horodi uncovers the mechanisms of immediate perception while simultaneously transforming them into creative, distant tools.

In Horodi’s work, the active body—whether hers or ours—is both reflective and productive. It critiques itself, maintaining a distance and autonomy. From this position of detachment, Horodi mobilizes her own body or that of the audience to create new images, representations, and modes of expression. These do not merely define the singular subject but foster the emergence of new communities.

Karam Natour

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship in – 2020

The Ingeborg Bachman Scholarship Prize, established by Anselm Kiefer, is awarded this year to Karam Natour (born 1992), a multimedia artist who employs drawing, digital printing, video and installations. Natour’s performative works involve the creation of knowledge sets emerging from the tension between mental states, the structuring of representative languages, and physical actions. Natour’s works expose common worldviews and perceptions as weak structures that depend on the subject that establishes them and on the relationship between the artist and his communities. Our knowledge of the reality and our participation in building these knowledge structures respond to two different paradigms that Natour offers inconsistently. In the first and objective one, we respond to the semiotic and scientific representations. In the second and subjective one, our actions and experiences create realities in an unmediated fashion. Natour exposes the phony nature of self-perception which assumes consistency between linguistic instructions and linguistic performance, between conscious and our perception of conscious, between being rational while being prone to prejudice, mistakes, and humor, and between malleable, frequently changing ethical, aesthetic, and political infrastructure that serves as the growth bed of complex identities.

These tactics make an ontological distinction between two modes of existence. The first modus depends on subjective experiences such as laughter, pain, and embarrassment, as can be seen in Nothing Personal (2017) and heat in My Head (2018). The other depends on pointing at worldly phenomena such as the sun, earth and moon in Repeat after Me (2018). This work sheds light on the evasive and invalidated nature of the spoken and written language and its different meanings in a cultural context that moves between Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Natour dictates semiotic phrases and Rule-Following Statements (a term coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein) as well as physical actions and speech ac performances. The first genre is exposed under the apriori rule, which disciplines the rendering of meaning. The second genre lacks apriori knowledge. Hence, its movement and meaning endow structure to the singular meaning order of each performance. Natour employs these performances to derive cartographies of fantastic knowledge, which fabricates cosmologies invented by the artist who creates a new world, as shown in genesis, a digital print of 2018, Sun, Saturn, Venus and Water (2020).

The Wolf Foundation awards the 2020 Art Kiefer Prize to Karam Natour, for expanding the performative practice, from establishing a subject that responds to the efficacy of pre-organized knowledge orders, to the establishment of personal, fictional space and time zones. Natour’s works face us with the question of how it is possible to move between objective epistemic arguments about specific knowledge fields and their subjective human rendering. This question endows art an ethical role of exposing the knowledge mechanisms and the spectators’ responsibility for creating a worldview.

Barak Ravitz

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2007

The Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship, founded by Anselm Kiefer, for the year 2007 is awarded to the artist Barak Ravitz.

Ravitz, born in 1982, graduated from the Art School – Midrash, Beit Berl College. During his studies and in the short time since completing them, this young artist has proven himself to be versatile, talented, and prolific. He works across a broad range of mediums, often utilizing everyday objects to create his minimal yet highly aesthetic works.

At first glance, Ravitz’s works appear simple, but closer inspection reveals sophistication, complexity, and humor. His works challenge accepted notions such as simplicity, “poverty of materials,” authenticity, locality, and patriotism. This reflects his thoughtful exploration of fundamental questions about the nature of art, including originality, the identity of the artist as creator, and the essence of “Israeliness.” These themes are addressed with a light, delicate touch, even as they engage with elements of Jewish cultural tradition.

Barak Ravitz has exhibited at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, Dvir Gallery, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery at the University of Haifa, Minshar Art Gallery, the Rubin Museum, the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, and the Cinematheque.

 

Ruti Nemet

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2000

Ruti Nemet, born in 1977, is a graduate of the Department of Art Education at Beit Berl College (1999). The intimate, domestic environments created by Ruthie Nemet and Zoya Cherkaski are populated by sculptures of figures that are both realistic and mythical, gently drawing us into a world that mimics reality while simultaneously being magical and dreamlike. Through slow and meticulous execution, they obsessively reconstruct living environments and concrete reality, while simultaneously alienating it through various estrangements (such as scale distortion, deformities, and the use of color), moving it towards the enigmatic, the fantastic, and the mythological. They have entered the collective consciousness as exceptionally original creators, standing out with their talent and imbuing their work with a powerful presence.

Naama Arad

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2015

Naama Arad, born in 1985, holds a bachelor’s degree in art from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (2010) and a master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014).
Her exhibitions include Africa-Israel at the Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery and El-Al at the Midrash Gallery in Tel Aviv. Her works have been showcased in various exhibitions in Israel and abroad, including at the Petah Tikva Museum, the Artists’ House in Jerusalem, Passage in Tel Aviv, as well as in Chicago, Detroit, and London.

Arad impresses with her ability to combine original material exploration with intellectual depth. Her works are crafted from accessible and inexpensive materials, cleverly and playfully continuing the Israeli heritage of resourcefulness and the tradition of international minimalism. Her research interests include architecture and sculpture, masculine systems of power, and canonical modernist art. Her works propose new expressions of modernity within the Israeli context, challenging established norms and authoritarian structures.

The unique syntax of her work—both material and conceptual—imbues her creations with a fresh and distinctive character, intelligently blending local and universal themes.

Tamar Harpaz

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2013

The Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship, founded by Anselm Kiefer, for the year 2013 is awarded to the artist Tamar Harpaz for the creativity and uniqueness of her work, which draws on the history of art and cinema, as well as her exploration, curiosity, and experimentation with forms and materials, resulting in complex and intriguing compositions.
Tamar Harpaz, born in 1979, is a sculptor and installation artist who holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Harpaz creates dynamic sculptural arrangements that evoke a sense of mystery and magic. Her works feature optical illusions while simultaneously revealing the techniques behind them, offering a glimpse “behind the scenes” of the mystery. Viewers are invited to explore laboratory-like spaces composed of slide projectors, glass panels, lighting fixtures, semi-transparent partitions, mirrors, household furniture, work tools, and objects imbued with symbolic and emotional significance.

The themes of her works relate to the history of cinema and the immediate domestic environment, where everyday objects are infused with symbolic and poetic values. Old projection devices and slide projectors play a central role in her creations. These devices, which have long been replaced by modern technologies, are resurrected in her work, embodying a nostalgic yet enigmatic and mysterious dimension.

Gilad Ratman

Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2011

The artist Gilad Ratman, born in 1975, is a graduate of Bezalel (BFA) and Columbia University in New York (MFA). In his diverse works, which include video, installation, and sculpture, Gilad Ratman examines the fine line between the cultured, proper, and orderly, and the wild, animalistic, and absurd. His videos are set in swamps, forests, deserts, and the outskirts of cities, with protagonists who are marginalized figures on the fringes of society, even inhabiting the twilight zones of sanity. His ambitious projects explore aspects of society that lie beneath the surface with a sharp and critical eye, using humor and absurdity, but also offering a pointed commentary on human nature, its desires, and anxieties.

His works are influenced by the history of cinema and theater, blending aspects of popular (and even “low”) culture with knowledge of art history and culture, as well as a keen social and political awareness.

In his works, a fascinating and original dialectic is created between harshness and coarseness, and delicacy and lyrical poetry. Some of his works deal with clear Israeli contexts, but most are deeply connected to universal experiences, the constant tension between the individual and society, and the desire to examine the boundaries of culture and the laws by which we live.