Liliana Kadichevski
Video installation

Mark Daniel Cohen
Poetry

One might think that a collaboration between two artists, particularly artists who work in such different art forms as video installation and poetry, would be rife with difficulties. However, the meshing of imaginative labors on "Waiting for an Echo" could not have been more trouble free, could not have been more of a pleasure.

I have worked once before with Liliana Kadichevski, on a joint effort of photographic images and poetry titled "The Wavering Breath," which was presented in Venice during the 2001 Biennale as part of the "Markers" exhibition. That experience taught us both about the similarity of our imaginations and the mutual respect we have for each other as craftspeople. There is between us a natural fit, a correlation of creative thought that permits us each to leave the other free to do what seems right, without having to force the efforts of one to match the efforts of the other. I know that the work Liliana creates out of her own impulses will fit spontaneously with what I am doing, even if she knows nothing of my latest writing, and it will always serve to prompt new and invaluable thoughts for further poetry. And I have learned that my writing does the same for her. It often seems as if, in working with each other, each of us can make no mistakes.

The work on "Waiting for an Echo" began with Liliana's videos, which were largely completed before I started to write. As I viewed them repeatedly, I found they offered me all the images and suggestions I needed regarded the nature of silence, the theme we took as our starting point. Her videos told me a story, a story arranged in metaphors of abstract conception and incidents of personal moment, silence conceived as a natural law that governs our lives and in intimate experiences of the way in which we live with silence, the way in which we live under that law. I feel as if I have merely written what Liliana has shown me and have done nothing more than try to write as poetically and as well as I can.

Prompted by Liliana's remarkably lyrical visual imagination, the poetry conceives of silence as existing in, and revealing, the gap in our natures. It is the gap of a fundamental contradiction, the contradiction between what we think and what we do, between what we control and what we suffer, between what we mean to accomplish and what we actually achieve-as the poem says, between "what an idea is, and what it does." The silence lives with us and within us as much as we live, and because we live, for the silence is centered in the most essential fact about us-that we are, and that one day we will no longer be, as thoroughly as if we had never been. We are riven by, and we live surrounded by, this contradiction, this inexplicable fact, this silence, and in "Waiting for an Echo," Liliana's videos attempt to reveal, and the poetry attempts to explain, something of what we truly are.

Mark Daniel Cohen

Liliana Kadichevski
is an Israeli visual artist born in Argentina, who exhibits in Israel and abroad, working basically in the field of digital media. She makes art related short documentaries and Video Art pieces, and has participated in international art venues such as the 49th Venice Biennial in Italy, the 2nd Buenos Aires Art Biennial in Argentina and Construction in Process VII in Poland. Her compilations of Video Art works by many Israeli artists have been screened at the Second International Four Cultures Dialog Festival, Lodz, the Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw and the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts, all in Poland, the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center, Buenos Aires and the Macro-Museum of Contemporary Art, Rosario, both in Argentina.

Short Clip From The Exhibition "Waiting For An Echo"

lilikadi@yahoo.com
www.lilianakadichevski.com
http://artistindex.co.il/main/artistPageEng.php?artID=83&method=works&let

Mark Daniel Cohen
is an American freelance author who writes regularly on art in New York City, with over 400 articles, art reviews, and essays on contemporary art and aesthetics in publication in a variety of art exhibition catalogues and commercial, university, and art school journals. He is also the editor of "Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics," a web journal on the arts that is published by The Nietzsche Circle. He has recently completed two books, The Judenporzellan of Izhar Patkin, soon to be published by the Tefen Museum in Tefen, Israel, and The Art of Kenneth Snelson, which is currently in production. In addition, he has contributed chapters to Chawky Frenn: Art for Life's Sake, Abstraction in the Elements, the second edition of Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes by Richard Kostelanetz, The Teutloff Collection at Brock University, Canada, and Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition.

cohenmd1@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/cohenmd1/Art_Writing/
http://www.nietzschecircle.com/hyperion.html

Untitled, (Waiting for an echo) Object, 24cm x17 cm, Based on a poem by Mark Daniel Cohen, 2006	Down to Zero, Still from video work, Based on The Inconceivable Geometry, a poem by Mark Daniel Cohen, 2006
Liliana Kadichevski