Eran Ofir Turner
Eran Ofir Turner, born in 1968,
Born in Nahariya and raised in Moshav Sadot in northern Sinai until evacuation in 1982.
He studied design and art at the Bezalel Academy and the "Artists for Social Change Program" at the Musrara School. He participated in dozens of exhibitions in the fields of painting, photography, and plastic arts.
His experiences from the desert spaces are realized in encounters with abandoned buildings, the use of objects that have lost their meaning, and with the help of their documentation, the words that created poetry were woven.
In his first book, Eran writes: "Poetry is a resonant dance between situations, an action, or a memory frozen in time, but manages to move and leap beyond the movement of life's reins, through the mysteries of those words."
During the Corona period, Eran worked on installations, photographs, and video art of situations depicting lockdown, shooting, loneliness, loss of control, etc.
100 meters from his home, there is 'Sde Dov', the abandoned local airport. "For me, the place is an opportunity to create and experience my feelings, a refuge for artistic creation, which has given rise to several parallel projects, which are related to me:
Documentation - the abandoned place and the eruption of nature that has taken hold of it by immortalizing it. Attraction to places where time has frozen due to abandonment, documentation of the eruption of nature and natural power. Using an artistic spotlight for the ravages of time, distortions of form, fracture, peeling, blurring and breaking boundaries until the fusion and processing of the parts of the whole into a meaningful whole creation. These activate me every time anew.
Assimilation - my merging into what exists and creating from it, adding new movement, a combination of a natural to naked body.
Recycling - creating jewelry and sculpting works from finds in the area and from existing containers. Sculpting and designing elements from those finds and placing them in the field and documenting them with photography. "Using stones, plants, and industrial waste."
Eran told reporter Meirav Shlomo Melamed, in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, who interviewed him.
"The ability to create from what exists in combination with nature in a place where time was locked, access was cut off and its importance disappeared. The moving life that symbolized it became still and neglect spread until its existence was forgotten. Penetrating it was fertile ground that brought graffiti artists to express emotions and engraving for generations. The combination of the place and its diverse openings, overlooking open spaces from which the expanses of the sea peek out, combined with nature's desire to take over and break out, thus breaking out of the permitted and known boundaries, are my inspiration palette."
The past resonates with me in places like these, inside houses and buildings that remain, various objects and memories of the lives that once existed there. For me, it is a reminder of my own ‘takeover’, upon entering the doorways of those buildings. An invitation to rediscover and use them as my own. As a child, I experienced the evacuation of Yamit (Moshav Sadot), entering abandoned houses, days before the area was returned to Egypt. My family was the last to be approved, in order to have time to move a collection of plants that had been created since the beginning of the settlement’s establishment, into the Green Line. This gave me the best time and quiet to penetrate the privacy of those places that had legal owners. The contact with what is found in the items that people chose to leave shaped my thinking and imagination. Sde Dov is a mirror that is a reminder of that period, of neglect, of entering broken doorways, which are an invitation to rediscover, the possibility of using the abandoned as my own. With the objects came the descriptions, the photographs, and the documentation, and all the experiences flowed into my poems.
I create installations from old objects, share them with my art and allow them and me to sanctify a memory, to re-experience a situation, bringing them the possibility of continuing to exist for a few more moments before they disappear forever. For me, they are a broad basis for artistic work and emotional experience. The series speak of important elements for me, combining old with new action, and from them emerges the ability to create a parallel world, in which artistic creation takes place, which manages to be preserved for another time.
2000-2007
Fellow at the "Musarra" Art School - Art for Social Change.
1996-1999
Bachelor of Arts and Design (BFA) Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts, Jerusalem, Department of Ceramics and Glass Design
1994-1995
External studies, Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Theater set design and model drawing.
1992-1993
Guidance studies, therapeutic-educational guide, 'Beit Cham' seminary, The Open University
Education
2025 - Drifted - A collection of short stories published by Ben Hamilim, edited by Yosef Even Shoshan
2025 - Dad and Dad Go on Vacation - a children's book about a proud family, longing and humor, self-published, edited by Karin Aharon and illustrated by Itai Levy (translated into English).
2023 - Four Seeds - a book of visual poetry that combines poetic texts with personal images, published by Eshkolot Poetica, edited by Shuki Gutman.
Publications
2023 - Flight of Infinity – Holocaust Poetry and Remembrance - Anthology, Eshkolot Poetica Publishing.
2022 - Awakening to Myself - Anthology of Poetry, Eshkolot Poetica Publishing.
Anthologies
2017 - Memorial statue for IDF fallen, iron and lighting - Rabin School, Kfar Saba
2016 - "The 12 Tribes" - Permanent Mosaic Exhibition, HaRaveket Park, Jerusalem
2015 - "The Way of Coins" - Mosaic Permanent Exhibition, Emek Refaim, Jerusalem
2015 - Sculpture Story Recycling Project, Schools, Jerusalem
2014 - "Transitions" - Solo photography exhibition, Gallery-Restaurant, Aldanta, Jerusalem
2011 - "Dialogue between Material and Color", Migdal Gallery, Tel Aviv-Yafo
2009 - "One+One", exhibition at the Product Sign House, Jerusalem
2009 - "Good Material", Product Brand House, Jerusalem
2008 - Sculpture Exhibition, KSTARA, Haifa
2008 - 60 Years of Education in Israel, Photographs, Kfar Maccabiah in collaboration with the Mandel Institute
2008 - Green Group Exhibition, Textile House, Tel Aviv
2008 - "Accessibility", group exhibition, graduates of the "Artists for Social Change" course, Musrara Tel Aviv
2008 - Exhibition on the theme of "The Neighborhood Living Room" and the Art Event, Katamonim. Jerusalem
2008- Exhibition for the Deer Valley, Jerusalem
2008- Exhibition "Eye on Jerusalem" Mamilla Complex, Jerusalem
2008 - South of Rechabiya, group exhibition. Yakar Gallery, Jerusalem
2007- "Mosaic - Group Exhibition", Gan Shmuel Art Gallery
2007- "Light and Shadow from the Katamonim", group exhibition, Denmark School Library, Jerusalem
2006- "The 4th Biennial of Ceramics and Architecture", Eretz Israel Museum
2006- "Local", art exhibition, Municipal Gallery, Jerusalem
1999 - Bezalel Artists Exhibition, Mandel School of Educational Leadership, Jerusalem
1999 - Graduate Exhibition, Bezalel Academy, Department of Ceramics and Glass Design
1997- Sukhchover Prize, for unique sherpas