Gold for All

How does one take the most intimate secrets, the moments recorded in a personal diary during times of emotional turmoil, which were never shared in real time, and put them safely out there, for strangers to see?

In the series Gold, Yana Stup encodes her secrets through laborious hand engraving on aluminum sheets, silver on one side and gold on the other, through words copied from her diaries and images originating in her life story and spiritual world. Upon approaching the gold surfaces, the engraved marks, resembling decorative ornaments at a distance, are revealed as words. Some were extracted from her private diaries, while others are "isolated words that surface during the work process, which stemmed from my emotional experiences," says the artist. Stup, who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union at the age of 7, engraves the Hebrew words in mirror writing, from left to right, with the naturalness reserved for writing in her mother tongue, Russian.
The "reverse" engraving is done on the silver side of the aluminum, so that when looking at the golden, "public" side, we see the Hebrew writing in "correct" form. The same reversal is also applied to words written in Russian. The act of reverse writing provides Stup with emotional distance from her biographical experiences, enabling her to release the bare words to the world.
The "reversed" word reflects the various stages typical of the formation of a "correct" or "incorrect" identity by someone who immigrated to Israel at a young age and is supposed to make every effort to assimilate into the absorbing society without giving up her "home" and culture of origin. The symbolic artistic act of word reversal illustrates the complex mental-internal ways required by a multicultural identity to reconcile its various parts, and the acquisition and processing of both languages—the mother tongue and the acquired language—play an important role in this process.
The tensions underlying identity formation, processing the childhood experiences of immigration and acclimatization in Israeli society, the loneliness and complex relationships in adulthood corresponded with the chosen artistic technique and the material used as a ground—aluminum.
The painstaking act of engraving in a material typified by an internal conflict between hard and soft (hard in appearance and hard to touch, until the moment of engraving, when its softness is revealed), helps the artist bring to the fore and then let go of the pain of trauma, rather than trying to blur or erase the biographical event that caused it.
The diptych Gate, which debuted in the group exhibition "Heart-Wisdom Alone will Repair"—the graduation show of the 2023-24 Yona Fischer Program for Contemporary Curatorial and Museum Studies at the Institute for Israeli Art, the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo—was featured in a central location in Jaffa Museum, luring the eye from a distance with the aluminum's dim, warm glow.
The tear in the aluminum, in the center of the right side of the diptych, is the "gate" allowing passage between emotional worlds. The red stitches surrounding it emphasize the unerasable existence of the torn and broken, as in the Japanese art of kintsugi (pottery repair). It points to the act of sewing as one that allows us to process the trauma of the fracture and live with it.
The motif of sewing and textile recurs in The Three Elements, where Stup incorporates a linen napkin from her country of origin, Belarus, which "was never used"—the product of diligent, meticulous work carried out by women in the past. Out of a nostalgic impulse, she redeems generations of unknown women, infusing their craft with meaning. Stretching the napkin within the hammered gold creates a link between past and present.
The female experience is figuratively discernible in Two Eves. Two female figures stand facing each other, hammered on an elliptical aluminum surface, embedded in a grid of cut aluminum strips. Curved stitches in gold thread are scattered around the figures. "As her name suggests, Eve (Heb. Hava) for me means experiencing (Heb. havaya) through presence," says the artist.
Stup also creates figurative paintings in oil comprising images of herself as a child and of her family, as well as images drawn from her childhood memories in the Soviet Union. Recently, however, she has focused on work in aluminum as an expression of her spiritual search. The color gold, used to amplify the spiritual experience in human culture since ancient times—from Buddhist temples to Byzantine churches—is used by Stup to carry experiences from the physical reality into the spiritual realm.
Her choice of the particular technique and material (engraving in aluminum) also reflects the clash between the rigid behavioral codes in the Soviet culture of origin, as experienced by Stup, and the softness and warmth, which she admits she needs as a person freeing herself from the doctrines of that culture. She associates gold with "Israeliness, the sun, and human warmth."
Surina reveals the contrast between the children's world and the adult world, a painful subject for those who were raised with Soviet cultural codes. "The world of children" is a code name for "being good, being quiet, not smiling like a fool, and never crying. You are not allowed to cry." The figure of the young girl engraved in gold, holding her doll, was inspired by the realistic paintings of 19th-century Russian painter Vasily Surikov. In reproducing the image of Surina through the act of engraving, she rescues her from the "children's world" in which she stood with her doll—"it sometimes feels as though this was all that children of that period were allowed to do"—and launches her into another era and a different childhood world. She echoes her image not as an imitation of Surikov's realism, but from a critical stance towards the period and the culture which was a platform for her own childhood traumas.
"Gold for All" is Stup's first solo exhibition. By engraving in aluminum, she translates the processing of life events, immigration, relationships, trauma, healing, and identity construction into a mystical-spiritual experience.