In the solo exhibition "Vortex", the artist Sharon Azagi presents a complex installation, which includes a video work called 'Balloons' and a spatial object ('Untitled'), between which sound and visual relationships exist.
'Balloons' (2024) In an abandoned agricultural field stands another field, lined, with 22 white helium balloons, connected to the ground by wires and concrete weights. In the alternate field stands a woman, singing "The Show Must Go On". The woman's voice, which we cannot hear, sets in motion a chain of unexpected events: sensitive microphones (condensers) pick up her voice, while a sound coding algorithm (vocoder) translates her singing into frequencies similar to a swarm of desert locusts, with words ending in the letter S activating the translation process . These frequencies are gathered into an alarming symphony, which in a surprising and coded technological array, according to words and syllables, produces an ignition action that sets the balloons free. At the same time, it ignites and explodes them, thereby preventing their destiny from being realized, while the sounds of the explosions are added to the symphony. In the gallery space, the video work is presented with simultaneous views of the unfolding sequence of events, so that the methods of photography and editing reveal the mysterious apparatus that exists between the field and the sky.
'Untitled' (2024) Alongside the video work, an array of light and lightning takes place in a mobile-like sculptural installation, made of fluorescent bulbs disconnected from electricity. Similar to what happens in the photographed field, the fluorescents in the gallery ignite without contact, by an electric current. Like lightning from the sky, electricity bursts from a Tesla coil (a device that produces a lightning-like electric current at high voltage). The frequencies produced by the desert grasshopper are the same as the frequencies produced by the Tesla coils and the fluorescent bulbs, and together they join in real time, in a live performance, as accompanying voices to the symphony played on the video. In her work, Azagi creates a developing connection between a living subject, technology and space, where the action of the body is a driving force for a chain of events that lead to a loss of control. The unfolding changes create a fantastic situation that produces a degree of unease. The works contain symbolic and dual-based images and contexts, taken from our existential concerns as well as from symbols that characterize our surroundings.
Sharon Azagi graduated with a bachelor's degree (2015) and a second degree (2020) in the art department, Bezalel. Engaged in video, sculpture, robotics, programming, cyber art and sound. In her work, she looks for ways of action and possible codings to learn how to mediate physical bodies through digital worlds, while drawing parallels between physical processes and mechanical and robotic processes. It builds systems, some physical and some computerized, that take information of one type and turn it into something else. The objects that Ezegi produces function as a hybrid between the digital and the real, breathing life into their static bodies and revealing the power of consciousness inherent in matter, light, water, sound and space itself.