On the trail of Ilit Azoulay

Ilit Azoulay is from Israel and she studied photography. (Her first camera was a gift from her grandfather, long before she went to college. I wonder if he suspected that Ilit had a great talent for photography!) In her studio in Schöneberg, she assembles collages - mainly on the computer - from thousands and thousands of photos, like a mosaic. This sometimes takes years, that's how elaborate it is. Sometimes Ilit also integrates sound into the collages.

Her workdays in the studio are very structured: She always starts at 8:30 a.m. and works until late afternoon - almost like a school day. Only on Wednesdays she is at the studio until 11 p.m. at night, and that is her favorite day.

Ilit's works hang in museums, galleries, with other artists and collectors. And a few also in her studio. Luckily, because we have never seen paintings like Ilit's! One of them particularly appealed to us: it consists of several composite pictures and frames, which are stuck in another polygonal frame. We try to describe what you see on the big picture. But that's not so easy, because other things keep jumping out at you. A monkey, a microscope, shards with Arabic writing, a mosaic, gold, ... What do these things have to do with each other?

We notice that the pictures tell stories. Stories that Ilit is actually not allowed to talk about - only with her art. The stories were entrusted to her by people who are great storytellers and have a lot of knowledge that hardly anyone else knows.

After listening to the secret stories, Ilit spends about a year researching objects related to the stories and photographing them.

To make sure she doesn't forget anything and to keep track of the objects and stories, she hangs profiles of the objects on the wall and makes notes on the photos: short texts in Hebrew, colorful stickers with letters and numbers on them like a secret code... She has invented her very own system!

We acted like detectives and tried to read the clues. What mysterious story is behind the work with the monkey? We came up with lots of adventurous ideas. Are we right in our guesses? Ilit smiles kindly - and shrouds herself in silence.

Art is full of secrets!