Of Time, 2025

Noa Simhayof Shahaf examines escape rooms and their psychological mechanisms. These rooms function as markers of a pseudo-concrete space: areas designed to define a certain geographic zone, yet in practice belonging nowhere, with their very purpose rooted in the act of exiting—escaping back into the "real" world.

Doors serve as entry points into homes, rooms, and offices, but they are also cinematic devices used to create suspense. In her installation The Time (2025), a standard room door, dominant in the Israeli market (and imported from China), stands at the center of the gallery as a painfully generic local reflection. Through a simple mechanical mechanism, the artist transforms the door into a suspicious entity, moving slowly like a supernatural performance, restless in the face of any disturbance. Like a dream cut short, the artist revisits the moment of climax over and over, urging us to dwell in the endless possibilities of "what if."

Nearby, a photograph is exhibited, recreating the 1931 work The Fright by Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz—a self-portrait that reveals the interplay between theater and photography under the shadow of war. The artist’s own face replaces that of the original, disintegrating into pixels that echo the present digital age. Simhayof Shahaf transforms Witkiewicz’s historical terror into a fractured image of contemporary reality. Together with the kinetic installation, she constructs a threshold space—a continuous moment of transition between the "here" of the physical body and the "there" of a fabricated reality.



Text provided by curater, Hadasa Cohen.