“The experience I am trying to transmit is the creation of unexpected combinations: take my own journey to search for connections in the nature of existence, and to create a world environment that stresses evolution, development, the spiritual possibilities manifested in reality.” (Dorit Feldman, 2018)

In the pack of cards that is the range of the religious experience, the mystic is the joker card, an enigmatic character existing both in parallel and outside, sometimes even as resistance to the boundaries of religious dogma. Unlike the modern philosopher or scientist, who prove their arguments from a hierarchical perception of knowledge – where an argument affirms or disproves previous claims based on a principle of repudiation. The mystic’s research is autodidactic and subjective, based on personal study and trial and error. The body is the starting point of the investigation and its heart’s desire – an unmediated, ecstatic union with the divine. 

The same heart’s longing is also the starting point of Dorit Feldman’s work. For the first time since her death in 2020, a solo exhibition of her work is on view. The exhibition presents her as a mystic who seeks to map and describe her physical and conscious experiences through a visual code language she has been developing throughout her life. A language that exists on the axis between scientific discovery and the world of the unknown, expressing a layered semantic realm where the exact sciences meet the study of esoterica and philosophy – the raw materials she feeds on – welded together in the heat of creation and demonstrating new conceptual ways of expression. 

The exhibition’s title, I_manyworlds, expresses one of the basic principles entrenched in the mystical thought mechanism – where the single “I” turns its gaze to its inner reality and finds a multiplicity of dimensions, the infinity of consciousness. This is also the main theme of the exhibition, which draws a line throughout Feldman’s entire body of work over the past four decades, and connects the self-portraits of her early work in the 1980s and her focus on feminine eroticism and her late works and the mosaic of Kabalistic and archetypal motifs that have later filled her works. Another component is her artist books, which she has been making all her life. They are part books and part sculptures, carefully designed and filled to the brim with details. These enigmatic travelogues recount her inter-dimensional journeys and document her visual and intellectual impressions. Feldman’s works are like visionary performances that bind the shells of reality and point to the feasibility of human evolution, where body, knowledge, matter, and consciousness are intertwined and welded together.

The word ‘mysticism’ is rooted in the Greek verb ‘mystion,’ to close the eyes or shut the mouth. In a re-examination of Feldman’s work, the same linguistic principle can be found in her works, where she closes her eyes to the dark unknown, to the enigmas of existence, and the mystery reflected at her in reality’s mirror images.