Tsibi Geva (b. 1951), Umm al-Fahm, 1984. Diptych. Mixed media on thin cardboard. Signed and dated. 200X70 cm. Good condition. Small holes and minor blemishes. Provenance: The Uzi Agassi Collection. Yona Fischer : Do the names of places you choose always have political connotations for you, or do they sometimes have poetic connotations? Tsibi Geva : I think about it in terms of a political haiku. The musicality, the reverberations, too, are content in the world. The names generate a frequency that has an origin and a resonance, or impact. They are linguistic, musical, conceptual and political elements that accumulates – first in me, and then in the works. I like this sort of concatenated thought, the idea that to a great extent the deeper meanings of what you're doing can only be revealed through an observation of the entire project, not by single pieces. A project is also a projection. A single piece is like a single word in a sentence or story. There's a fundamental difference between a painting of a terrazzo tile and tiling, if you will, or occupying a territory, territorialization. Already at a very early stage in my career, in the series of works that includes Umm el-Fahem and Biladi Biladi (1983-85) I thought that such works, in which the inscribed words are a key image, may work on their own, but when you stand in a space that's completely surrounded by names of Arab places written in Hebrew, it becomes a whole sphere and generates a reference field that is charged with meaning. As a viewer, you find yourself "confined" in a suggestive electricity field. Pointing at invisible villages is an act of indicating and focusing, bringing them to the foreground and defining an alternative territory to that of the Zionist narrative, to this story we were raised on. This act also defines itself along the time axis. Things have added up, have been built one on top of the other, very slowly. Tsibi Geva in Conversation with Yona Fischer. From: Tsibi Geva: Transition, Object, exhibition catalog, Ashdod Museum of Art (curated by Yona Fischer and Roni Cohen-Binyamini), July-November 2012. pp xiii-xiv.