Simon Holischka

The breaking of the vessels

Der Bielefelder Fotografiestudent Simon Holischka beschreibt seine Arbeit »The breaking of the vessels« mit diesen Worten:

»And it was there, where I discovered stones, that were broken with sharp edges, just like knives and tools from the stone age. The whole area was covered with these shards. I started collecting them and continued to collect them also from places like the Holy Grave, the Temple Mount and the Masada fortress. I got really interested in these broken pieces of spiritually, conceptually and historically charged matter. They proved to be both – Kelim (vessels, tools) and Qlippoth (shards, peels, broken pieces, splinters) – therefore relating to two different aspects about the ›Breaking of the Vessels‹ (Shvirat Hakelim), an explanatory model taken from the Lurianic Kabbalah. These small rocks were so much at the core of so many thoughts and questions I had about the emergence of meaning and about how conceptions of the world are constructed, that I spent many weeks photographing them, carefully magnifying them with a macroscopic lens and a technique called ›focus-stacking‹, i.e. taking a series of images changing the area of focus in small steps. These photographs are processed and combined, using the sharpest areas, to form one image with optimum overall sharpness. This left me with high- quality prints of which I chose ten to represent the ten Sephirot (energies). This link to the theories of jewish mysticism is one aspect that adds up to the geological, geometrical, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, historic and emotional dimensions of this body of work. It is titled ›Breaking of the vessels‹ because both my project and the original story deal with the creation, construction and collapse of meaning. It is about ›making sense‹, you could say.«

Simon Holischka studierte von 2010 bis 2013 an der FH Bielefeld. »Der Bruch der Gefäße« ist seine Master-Arbeit, die in Israel fotografiert und in Bielefeld von Katharina Bosse und Kirsten Wagner betreut wurde.