Fatma Shanan continues her quest for inner and outer forms of nature, whether in her transitions between video and painting or between the Ramon Crater’s layers of rock and the Dead Sea. In her exploration of geographical and intrinsic territories, Shanan traverses countries and continents, gradually shedding layers as she moves toward unity with everything around her. In her most recent series, at the heart of “Still in Motion,” her body merges with the earth, becomes one with trees, floats upon water, and transforms into fertile ground for sprouting a new narrative.

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Shanan has, in recent years, reexamined her relationship with her surroundings. Whitman’s exploration of the unmediated bond between man and the world celebrates one’s direct connection with nature, depicting grass as a harbinger of eternal, cyclical renewal.

In a series of intense performative acts, Shanan examines the moments when the boundaries between her body and her immediate environment dissolve. As she spends hours in the thick waters of the Dead Sea, her body shifts between solid and liquid, between sinking and floating, becoming a drifting, blooming island; flowers erupt from her flesh as she focuses on inhaling and exhaling. In the ocean of Miami, Shanan lingers in an intermediate state—neither fully awake nor asleep, neither drowning nor floating. Upon the rocks of the crater in Mitzpe Ramon, Shanan’s body grapples with the unexpected crumbling of the soft rock. The crater, itself shaped by the movement of water—from the Tethys Sea, which once flooded it, through the formation of marine sedimentary rocks, to the receding of the sea and the rivers that swept away the soft stones—continues to transform, sculpted by both the forces of nature and the artist’s body. Shanan does not strive to conquer the mountain or force the rocks to the peak. Unlike Sisyphus, who endlessly pushes the rock uphill only to watch it roll back down, she seeks to encounter the rock through her hands, to fathom it, to explore the possibility of the rock rolling downward not merely as a punishment imposed by the gods, but out of its own profound yearning to return to the earth on which it once stood. It is not only Sisyphus pushing the...