Through the Eye of the Needle

The body of embroidery works by Batya Shani presented in this exhibition does not seek to engage with traditional notions of "craft". Rather, Shani employs textile and needle as tools for drawing, painting, and sculpting in space. In her creative process, fabric functions not merely as a surface but as a living body that carries memory. The work emerges from a need to charge old materials – private textiles that have absorbed entire lives – with new meanings. Shani's work is characterized by absolute spontaneity. She does not embroider according to a sketched outline or a preconceived plan; the stitches arise from intuitive action, akin to murmured prayers that elude spoken language. Where words fall short of containing emotional intensity, embroidery becomes a cryptic script – a form of visual gibberish that articulates the unspeakable. This is a personal prayer flowing directly from the heart onto the fabric, a private language of stitches that maps the artist's soul in real time. Batya Shani's act of embroidery echoes the Sisyphean and meditative rhythm of prayer, in which the repetition of words and gestures becomes a vehicle for intention and connection. The embroidery becomes a quiet, tactile prayer that seeks to mend ruptures and to give form and meaning to what often remains beyond words. For Shani, embroidery is an act of healing that passes through physical pain. The needle is a dual instrument: it wounds, pierces, and perforates the fraying fabric, yet simultaneously serves as a tool of repair and consolation. The tension between tightened stitches and expanses of unraveling fabric forms a visual language of tension – testimony to a continual struggle between disintegration and repair. Shani continues this tradition of high art, in which the medium itself becomes a poignant conceptual language. She does not embroider to embellish, but rather, to probe the limits of material and psyche, thereby reclaiming the historically "feminine" craft within the field of contemporary art.