Lee Yanor, Suspended II, 2024
Lee Yanor (B. 1963)
Suspended II, 2024
Video and sound installation on chiffon
Video editing: Ifat Tadmor, Sasha Franklin; Original music: NORSCQ, People Like Us; Sound mix: Kobi Eisenman
Lee Yanor’s video installation is the product of a dialogue with Dr. Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal (Department of Psychology and School of Neuroscience), who studies empathy, social biases, and pro-social behavior. This work is a development of an earlier work (Suspended I), which Yanor created during an artist’s residency at the Weizmann Institute of Science (2023). Yanor focuses on aspects of human connection, memory, and on the giving and receiving of empathy. Her dialogue with Dr. Bartal was concerned with empathy as a behavior whose biological basis is shared by animals and humans. Bartal’s research focuses on the neurological basis of pro-social behavior, has revealed that certain mammals, such as rats, develop a desire to help animals belonging to other species following a short period of co-habitation. Each attempt to help another animal activates their brain’s reward system as they expand their circle of care. Bartal’s findings encourage us humans to connect to our empathic capacity, revealing its potential flexibility.
Yanor’s work forms a natural “field” that invites us to walk through it. Its diaphanous layers of chiffon carry layers of images from both external and internal sources. As one crosses the flowing, ethereal field, the sense of worldly temporality is suspended. The prints of wheatfields and changing landscapes, dripping water and human hands are all in constant motion, inviting us to walk through and to approach it from different angles. The movement of images and of those moving between them thus interrelate. Yanor’s film-making practices capture layers of memory, giving rise to embodied memories surging up from the past.
In Suspended II, the external, natural world becomes deeply familiar, appearing as a reflection of a personal inner world. At the same time, the inner world undergoes a process of estrangement, appearing as a series of colorful flashes whose origin remains unknown. The work incorporates brain scans taken from Bartal’s lab, which capture the firing of neurons during helping activities. Yanor transforms these into star maps, galaxies of empathy. Identification with the other’s difficulties depends, to a large extent, on our capacity to perceive things from their point of view – a process that involves reflection and projection. Walking through the landscape of reflections created by Yanor enables us to bring together internal and external worlds, traversing the distance and drawing closer to one another.
