Sasha Okun’s work at the Jerusalem Print Workshop spans nearly two decades, during which dozes of etching plates and hundreds of trial prints were made, and an ongoing continuum of material, formal, and spiritual investigation took place. This investigation did not necessarily strive to arrive at a “finished work,” but rather to linger, to dwell, and to listen to what the image seeks to become.

The current exhibition does not present “unfinished” works in the conventional sense but rather states of work: moments within the process, points of suspension, open propositions.

For Okun, etching was not merely a technique but a temporal space – of repetition, revision, hesitation, and refusal to resolve into a single final form.

In an art world that rushes to declare outcomes, define meaning, produce closed forms of wholeness, Okun’s work offers another position: one that seeks to keep the image open, vulnerable, breathing. Not as hesitation, but as recognition that the visual image, just like the thought and life itself, is not bound to be fully exhausted.

For him, the plate was not merely a means of producing a print, but a site of ongoing dialogue – with material, light, paper, and above all with himself. The line was etched, erased, and reappeared, not as a clear decision but as a trace of a living process. In this sense, the displayed prints are not “stages toward a work,” but the work itself: one that insists on existing within movement rather than closure.

The Jerusalem Print Workshop was for Okun not merely a technical facility, but also a space enabling this form of creative existence – a space containing incompletion, suspension, and an ongoing search, without demanding a quick resolution or a predetermined result. The exhibition invites the viewer to slow down, linger, and observe the image not as something to be fully deciphered, but something to dwell with. Not to see the print as an outcome – but as time.

In this sense, this exhibition is not about what is complete, but about what remains open. Not about ending, but about possibility.

Curator: Arik Kilemnik