The first corona shutdown in 2021 left Bella Khavetskin closed and locked inside the busy studio, full of packed artworks that had returned from a large solo exhibition. When the doors of the museums and the world of culture as we knew them closed and changed, it seems that big changes also apply to the world of art, when digital media took the place of the physical space.

The space took on a new meaning and out of an apocalyptic feeling, Khavetskin and her works entered that virtual sterile space, where it was exposed and criticized by the audience. Khavetskin’s large-scale, color-saturated, image-laden works were now at the mercy of the device; The size of the screen and its quality. The physical copy remains irrelevant, the NFT, the unique digital document has the value within that space.

Chavetskin’s pop works refer to popular culture as they appear, and through a rich and diverse world of images Chavetskin defines herself as an Israeli artist, her dreams and her social and interpersonal aspirations, she reacts and even examines various issues of society, especially during the Corona period, from different perspectives: from the history of art, From the Russian language, from parody, and undermines the concepts of reality, the real versus the fake, the real versus the fake.

The performance in which Khavetskin’s works are seen going up in fire, shown in the videos, guarantees their uniqueness and, as with Richter after the burning of his paintings, gives room for liberation, and enables purification and rebirth. Observing the same performance, the same fire, attracts the eye and mesmerizes the viewer, but leaves a feeling of missing that original, physical copy of the mind. Inside a burial urn, there are ashes remaining from the act of cremation, and on them, in addition to the address with the details of the work, there is also a QR code – a two-dimensional code in which textual information is encoded in a graphic form, leading to the new space: the NFT store where the prints, the digital copies are displayed as a product of the artist .

The exhibition “Unchangeable Value” echoes the postmodern discussion on the concept of the simulacra, when Khavetskin’s works are no longer a copy and their reality slips away when the original was set on fire. Chavetskin observes her artistic work during the plague period and after, and describes the paradox of the cyberspace that expands the boundaries of imagination but challenges and threatens our basic assumptions regarding the “authentic” reality.

Photo: Ryan Tedrick.