Exploring the visualisation of language.

Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson
Berlin 2023

Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson is a visual artist who examines cultural self-definition on individual and communal levels. Born in Moscow (1984), immigrated to Israel (1991), and residing in Berlin since 2016, her hybrid identity propels the creation of migratory anarchist aesthetics, exploring displacement and integration through visualisation of  linguistic elements. Ella posits that the association of a particular text to a place constitutes an artistic modality, as she engages in temporary interventions and site-specific murals within public domains, museums and galleries.

Language and typography are pivotal cultural components, signifying essence in both content and form. Ella challenges linguistic rigidity by fusing diverse typography systems from various alphabets, fostering visual hybridity. Her works resist easy consumption by any reader/viewer and are reluctant to be deciphered. In them, the viewer experiences texts as a space of emotion and intent, in which images of words have more than one distinct identity and inherent meaning. Overlapping realities and time, the text takes a new form that reflects upon the simultaneity of the trivial and the life- (or world-) changing events of the present day.

Ella studied in Bezalel Academy of Arts Jerusalem and in the School of Visual Arts NY City. In 2022 she represented the Yiddish culture in the frame of the Yiddishland Pavilion in the Venice art biennale. Some of her intervention locations are Pathos Theatre, Munich (2023), CLB gallery, Berlin (2022), Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main (2021), the Muslim Academy i. G. and the University of Jewish Studies, Heidelberg (2021), Antique Toy Museum (Mexico City, 2020), ZK/U Berlin (2019), Kindl Brauerei, Berlin (2019), The Jerusalem Biennale (2019) and JCC, Berkeley, California (2018). Works were shown in at Root Division gallery, San Francisco (2020), Literaturhaus Berlin (2019), BB Galeria, Kraków (2017), Mazeh 9 Gallery, Israel (2017), Almacén gallery (2017), the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Culture, Israel (2016-2017), Jaffa Museum (2016-2017) and more. Work is included in the collection of Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main (2017). Her projects were funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture (2021), Kulturprojekte Berlin (2020), Asylum Arts, New York (2017, 2020, 2022) and others. Reviews and interviews have been published in numerous media channels, including the Federal Agency for Civic Education Germany, Der Tagesspiegel, the Jüdische Allgemeine, In Geveb, Asymptote Journal and others.

ella.poni@gmail.com