BFAMI x Kibbutz Be’eri Gallery for Contemporary Art
BFAMI has collaborated with Sofie Berzon Mackie offering you the opportunity to purchase a limited edition artwork ‘Lighthouse #1′ 2024, support of Kibbutz Be’eri Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Berzon Mackie immigrated to Israel from London in 1990. She is a curator and visual artist and a member of Kibbutz Be’eri as well as being the Director and Chief Curator of Be’eri Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Berzon Mackie primarily engages with photographic and lens-based mediums, though explores and experiments with various materials within her practise. Her work is interconnected to her life experience and biography, over the years and especially due to recent events her practise has evolved though continues to maintain her core themes exploring notions of identity, immigration, nature vs. culture, hybridity, and home.
BFAMI is grateful to have had the opportunity to welcome Berzon Mackie to London in January 2024 for the “Beacon of Light” Dinner & Art Auction which took place not long after the atrocities of 7th October 2023. Berzon Mackie spoke of her harrowing experience though her story was eclipsed by words of hope and optimism, “we can defy the death and violence that has destroyed our past, with this beautiful tool we have. A tool that turns pain into hope. The tool of creation. We can begin to heal. And light the way back home. I would like to invite you to join me, in this historical journey of finding hope. A mission of creating a strong, healthy vision for the future, and nurturing life where it has been destroyed”.
Lighthouse #1, 2024
Where do we begin after everything was lost?
It took me a long time, or no time at all, to begin creating again.
I admit I do not like reflecting on the first few months after my world was destroyed in October.
There is nothing to say about what happened.
But there are things to say about what came later, and along with fragments of words, images started to appear. They were not born out of nothing, they are a version of myself, yes, there is a ‘Myself’ that crossed the border that separated my life into ‘before’ and ‘after’. There was a delicate wish to begin collecting my shattered self, my scattered interstellar dust, and put it back together. Collages, of course, what more can one do when you fell apart. Some of the pieces I recognized, others were unfamiliar but I learnt they are also a part of me.
Interstellar dust from NASA archives. Ancient bacteria that formed first life. James Webb telescope images of our universe. Owl wings, childhood stories, countless memories of seeds, shells and a lamppost from my Kibbutz, that once showed the way home.
Microscopic beginnings of new singularities, holding all that came to an end, my whole past held in a capsule that will become all new beginnings. And then there was light.
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24 x 29cm + 1 cm white border for framing.