The fleeting actions one takes in one’s lifetime and the depths of universal time mount up into mounds – hills created from successive human settlements, each building over and burying the next. The mound operates through accumulation, concealment, and exposure. It contains both a temporal continuum and the present – it is a monument built in collaboration with time.
Tamir Chen’s exhibition Mound features drawings, collages, paintings, and sculptures created in the past year. The works are physical and tactile, tightly binding the human body to the perception of ever-shifting time. Despite being built along lines of accumulation and concealment, the works seek to bare their interior to the viewer, including him in the buried space created during the artistic process.
The process begins with the meeting of two essences: bird and stone. Tamir seeks out and documents run-over bird carcasses by roadsides, as well as rocks, fossils, and hand axes. To him, the bird is life force, a boundless movement, the fragility of existence. The rock is inertia, mute testament to the protracted processes of material formation. Together, the two form both sides of the path along which the works proceed, generating the tension that drives all actions in the studio. The drawings and collages are fusing places, containing a frenzied tangle of lines and blotches that connect bird and stone into a single complete entity.
The thirty-two paintings hang together as a single, tight tapestry, creating a black, dark wall. Each painting is made of multiple layers of past paintings covering one another, until finally they are buried under a black layer on which drawing elements are re-carved.
A few paintings are chosen to reincarnate in the system, turning into the bird and the stone. The paintings are removed from their frames, and sewn with surgical thread into sacks, into which layers of hot wax are poured. They harden into a body and then bisected – the fabric becoming skin, a statue.
Tamir Chen’s exhibition is the space of a burial mound – every object covers the other, and out of the thick stratification arises a new event, with multiple layers that illuminate each other.

The exhibition catalog includes a conversation between Tamir Chen and Abraham Kritzman, the exhibition curator.