Interview‘We Exist in the Gaps Between these Fixed Identities’

10 February 2025

Photo: Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson

In the medium of writing, language takes on a visual, rule-based form. Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s calligraphic art defies these rules and questions the boundaries between different kinds of script – and with them the self-image of their users. In early 2025, she is Artist in Residence at the CSMC.

Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, in your art you constantly work with language and writing. Why are they so central to what you do?

From early childhood, there were three languages in my life: Russian, Hebrew, and English. When I was five years old, my family moved from Moscow to Jerusalem, where I was fascinated by the multilingual street signs, for example. My access to the world was always visual. I wondered: How can something that means the same look so different? Why does one go from left to right and the other from right to left? This fascination has never left me and still underlies everything I do today: I want to understand how languages and scripts have developed, why different scripts look the way they do, and how their appearance reflects on cultural identities.    

In 1990s Jerusalem, you were not supposed to speak Russian in the streets; my family and I only did that at home. For me, it felt like a personality change every time, as if I were a completely different person at home than I was outside, sometimes Russian, sometimes Israeli. At some point, I realised that I am neither one nor the other, that we exist in the gaps between these fixed identities. This insight has given me a lot of flexibility, both as an artist and as a human being.

You often work on walls in public spaces. What attracts you to them and how do you decide which text belongs on which wall?

For me, art creates a very intimate and powerful connection to the world. It is driven by the same desire that makes people religious and makes them want to have children: to see oneself in the world. In this respect, working in public spaces is much more satisfying than in galleries or museums because it forms a connection to the broader public rather than to just art consumers.    

It is very important for me to adapt my work to the respective location. There has to be a link between the site and the text. Finding it is sometimes easy and sometimes very difficult. For example, if I write a Yiddish poem from the 1920s on the wall of a building in Berlin that belonged to a train station from which the deportation of Berlin’s Jews took place, the connection, the tension is immediate. But sometimes I simply have to work with the wall I have. Then I have to delve deeper into the history of the place until I find the right aspect and can relate it to a text that concerns me. This can be a very long and messy process.

It is an incredible experience to learn that what I do today can be linked to ancient traditions in completely different cultures.

Working in public spaces also means that many of your works disappear after some time. Don’t you regret that?

My works are temporary, but all art is, and not just art. In my life, everything has always been temporary: I have constantly moved, I have no fixed home, no fixed identity. And I think that nobody does, not even those who believe that about themselves.

Of course, there is art that is intended to last forever. In Russia, for example, there are gigantic Lenin statues in the middle of nowhere that would require extreme forces to remove. That is the opposite of what I strive for in my art. I want to be soft. For my works, I choose materials that will eventually disintegrate in contact with the material on which I write, or I overwrite myself, just as each new generation writes their account of history over that of previous generations.

At the CSMC, you meet researchers who systematically engage with the writing cultures that you invoke in your work. What do you want to draw from this?

Arriving here felt a bit like coming home. When I’m doing research for my work, I usually rely on books and the internet. Here I have access to an enormous amount of very specific knowledge directly from the people who produce it. For a long time, I have been thinking about how the appearance of letters influences our perception and shapes our understanding of a text. You can write one and the same word in a thousand different ways and people will read it differently each time. Here, I have a researcher in the office next door who is investigating how people perceive different Japanese characters without being able to read them. Here I meet experts on writing systems in ancient Babylonia, in the Islamic Middle Ages, on Arabic calligraphy, on graffiti and its history. For example, I recently learned that in China, thousands of years ago, poetry was written in public spaces – which is what I do. I had never studied Chinese culture before. It is an incredible experience to learn that what I do today can be linked to ancient traditions in completely different cultures. This knowledge connects my practice to the world and to history in a powerful new way and gives me a new and fascinating rabbit hole to go down to.    

What do you want to work on during your time as an artist in residence?

That hasn’t been decided yet. It is very important to me to come here with an open mind and not arrive with a preconceived plan. I want to get inspiration and absorb as much of the knowledge that is available here as possible. Some of what I take with me will certainly impact later works, some of which I am already working on. This year I will be realising a large mural in Philadelphia, the first Holocaust memorial public mural in the United States. In doing so, I am dealing a lot with the community members and, in a sense, extracting the text from the community. I will be working with different writing systems again. I am preparing for this here and would particularly like to learn more about cuneiform and Arabic writing systems to develop ideas on how to relate them to contemporary texts.