"WORKS" 2000
The Museum of Israeli Art Ramat-Gan.
Writing in a the Picture`s Shadow
By Levia Stern.
… “The images created by Lee Yanor are not specific images. They are in constant motion, rendering a tableau, a spectacle of sensations, feelings and thoughts.
It is an allegorical journey, like that of Bruce Chatwin in his book The Songlines;
A voyage to a land where the people leave their traces on the paths in words and notes, and converse in song. A voyage to a place where the song is also a map, a navigational tool – if you recognize the song, you will always find your way along and across the country. It is a land where distances are measures in songs, and poetry is the refined entity.
In Lee Yanor`s works the images are like discrete syllables; the body is present-existent in-between all images… The alphabet of the images begins with the alphabet of the body- leg, hand, finger, eye...
Lee yanor`s images flood the room, wandering on the walls and the floor. Flooded, they flood the space with light; they are filled and emptied before our very eyes. They are shadows – flashes of mouvements. The space becomes a symbol, a platform for images. The body is represented as a site of lost unity, a place which once embraced an entity…”

Memory Fields / Lee Yanor
Fine Art Museum Taipei, Taiwan
By Milana Gitzin- Adiram
Memory, in the work of Lee Yanor, does not content itself with documenting, preserving and commemorating reality. It calls for a much more substantial form of action. It urges us to revitalize the frozen image; to denude the figurative and the taken-for-granted; and to dive into a private and collective world of associations, in which reality is composed of an abstract, alternative language of symbols and unifying signs.
In the exhibition "Memory Fields," Yanor creates a kind of monumental and infinitely layered memory game, which weaves together a multitude of images and associations. She draws together, exposes and conceals memory images from numerous places and periods – transforming them into a unified whole. She reexamines the right to freeze movement and to break it down into individual components. At the same time, Yanor wishes to examine the ability to recompose the frozen image-fragments into a vital flow.
"Memory Fields," the title of this exhibition, also alludes to the ultimate sensory experience that is supposed to accompany the observation of the perfect life cycle. The seasons of the year follow one another in a symmetrical order, sublime beauty surrounds the viewer on all sides and aesthetic perfection flickers upon the nine inflated screens and through the ethereal photographs. Yet the title also hints ironically at the ephemerality of happiness – since at any moment clouds may gather in the sky, leaving the viewer with nothing but frozen fragments of memory and a shattered dream.

A Journey with Pina Bausch
Smadar Sheffi
Coffee with Pina is a film that refuses to adhere to conventions. It is not fiction, yet not quite documentary either. More than anything else, this film is a study of documentation, memory and experience. This film creates a stream of consciousness that immerses the viewer in beauty, strength and an intense joie de vivre. Within these one can find a rare ingredient that can be defined as realistic optimism.
The film starts with the first meeting between Lee Yanor and Pina Bausch, one of the greatest dance artists of the last 40 years. Bausch has created in her field, Tanztheater, that frequently touches on visual arts, a series of works that make a lasting impression on anyone who sees them.
The acquaintance between Bausch and Yanor, the filmmaker, began in Paris in the early 1990s. Yanor, a visual artist, was working at that time with many choreographers and had made several short films about dance. Coffee with Pina was filmed in three sessions that took place in Paris in 2003 and in Wuppertal, Germany, in 2005. Yanor filmed the dance performance Agua (Water) in Paris. She also filmed Bausch in her favourite café, Mistral, at rehearsals and in the park next to Les Halles. Yanor arrived in Wuppertal to see the premiere of Bausch’s Rough Cut. She filmed parts of the dance, encounters with the dancers at various moments, but most of the film consists of meetings with Bausch at her home studio.
The film created by Yanor comprises images from these intimate meetings interweaved with dance parts filmed at rehearsals and performances, although most of them have been changed beyond recognition. Yanor’s camera focuses on the characters on the margins of the stage. She transferred musical elements from parts of the performance to other parts, introduced sounds of trains, wind and rain into the soundtrack and created layer upon layer of images.
These images are interspersed with snippets of natural landscapes (especially from the forests that surround Wuppertal) and urban pictures such as Wuppertal’s unique train (the only one in the world to be suspended from upper tracks,) the zoo or street scenes and Parisian architecture. All the fragments come together into a stirring tapestry that takes the spectator on an internal journey full of emotion.
Yanor, who uses photography extensively (her last solo exhibition was in HaHeder [The Room] Gallery, Tel Aviv, in 2004,) created a film that could be frozen at any given scene and framed as an image in its own right. She offers the viewer an abundance of images that at times becomes almost abstract, although the entire film is figurative. The meetings with Bausch are short, include little verbal communication, but are rich in expression and beautiful movements, and she appears at times to be a fictitious character, a woman whose movements are so complete, whose presence is so intense, that they seem almost impossible.
We can look back at her short appearance in the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s film Hable con ella [Talk to Her]. Almodovar filmed Bausch in Café Müller, one of her better-known performances. Yanor filmed her in her Wuppertal studio where she danced part of her solo from Danzon, a dance that premiered in 1995 and is seldom performed. Bausch appears to search for the right movement and then immerses herself in it as if changing her physical state; her intensity gives the viewer the feeling of watching a ceremony, a feeling amplified by the minimalism of the scene and the lack of scenery.
Yanor used super 8 mm film and video to create the film. The images throughout switch between colour and black and white. In the editing room, Yanor created many strata of images reminding us of screen upon screen of transparent cloth. The result is a fantastic mélange of situations: Paris buildings on a sunny day under a layer of water (from water fountains, also in Paris), dance scenes over and under a polar bear moving in water, or pictures of a forest over/under a dancer spinning round in circles, wearing a green dress.
The intensity of the film is captivating. It ends in a black and white shot of Bausch and leaves the viewer with a new insight into the power of motion as a means of touching the soul, the most inner self. The images, that appear so evasive, linger in memory long after the film is over.
Coffee with Pina; Director and Cinematography: Lee Yanor; The film will be screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival on Saturday at 8:30pm and will appear on Channel 8 on the 22nd at 9:30p
Smadar Sheffi is an art critic for Haaretz newspaper and a cultural theoretician.