Exploring the visualisation of language.

Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson
Berlin 2025

Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson is a multilingual visual artist, born in Moscow, who immigrated to Israel in 1991 and has been based in Berlin since 2016. Her work has an international reach, spanning across most continents. Ella’s own hybrid identity drives her to inspect cultural self-definition in individuals and in communities. Within a dialog with 20th century’s Anarchist theories, she explores and contemplates manifestation of migration and integration processes through visualisation and erasure of language, thus engaging in creation of lingual nomadic anarchist esthetics. She believes that connecting a particular text to a place is a form of art, creating interventions in public spaces and site-specific murals in public locations, museums and galleries. Her interventions are created to expose moral corruption in the midst of contemporary subjects rooted in history, as their goal is to combat binary perception, and to trigger a public discussion.

Language and typography are defining elements of a culture. By using strict sets of rules, each indicates the nature of that culture both in content and in visual form. Ella’s works contradict the rigidity ascribed to language by using diverse typography systems from different alphabets to create a visual hybridity. However “a word is strongly related to the rationality of life; it acts as the bearer and mediator of life's needs” (“Day Figures”, D. Vogel). Language mediates meaning and its justification of its role in a visual form is complex, as the content stands in the foreground. When rendered visually, a text abstracts. As the obligation to language fades, the content becomes a superstructure, and is reconstructed into a new experience. As legibility is obscured, the text tips over into its sub-context: its identity. A new kind of text can thus emerge. Ella’s ‘vandalistic’ actions are intended to be an example of such a form of visual poetry. Her works resist easy consumption by any viewer and are reluctant to be deciphered. In them, the viewer experiences texts as a space of emotion, in which word-images have more than one distinct identity and 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. She won a commission from Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation to create the USA’s first public Holocaust memorial mural (2025). Currently an Artist in Residence at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg (2025). Her notable interventions include; the Union Complex, Frankfurt (2024), Pathos Theatre, Munich (2023), Venice art biennale (2022), Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main (2021), PHV, JMKT; Jewish / Muslim Culture Days, the Muslim Academy 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), JCC, Berkeley, California (2018). Works were shown in at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2024), Root Division gallery, SF (2020), Literaturhaus Berlin (2019), The Altes Rathaus Marzahn, Berlin (2018), Jewish Culture Festival, Kraków (2017), Mazeh 9, Israel (2017), Almacén gallery, , Israel (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