Shai-Lee Horodi

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.