LASER Talks in Jerusalem.
When Words Become Images: The Visual-Verbal Continuum
The INEMEA Association, in collaboration with CYLAND, presents a discussion exploring how text can function as both language and material, revealing the unstable boundary between reading and seeing while questioning the foundations of meaning, perception, and communication in a hybrid visual-verbal landscape.
Participants: Nadia Adina Rose, Shir Meller-Yamaguchi, Dr. Evgeniya Vezhlyan
Chaired by: Galina Bleikh
Moderated by: Daria Kesler
EVENT INFO
When: Monday, October 20, 2025, at 7:00 PM (UTC +3) | Find your timezone HERE
Where: Hybrid event
- In-person: The President Hotel Art Center, Ahad Ha-Am str. 3, Jerusalem, Israel.
- Online: Access via Zoom (please register to receive the Zoom link)
Website: INEMEA
This talk investigates the intersection of language and visual form. By examining how text can function as both sign and image, we explore new frameworks for cognition, perception, and artistic expression. The continuum between verbal and visual systems reveals the materiality of language and its potential to mediate complex interactions between humans, technology, and environment. We will also explore what “text” means in contemporary artistic practice and what new expressions can embody or perform it today.
Nadia Adina Rose presents her talk Text Beyond Words. This presentation traces how childhood stuttering and later linguistic displacements were transformed into an innovative artistic practice. At 22, immersed in a foreign language environment, Roz first experienced text not as meaning but as pure graphic form—a constellation of signs without verbal reference. Through textile installations, she explores the porous boundary between language and image, between communication and perception. Branches, windows, silhouettes of trees: at once they appear as visual figures and as text-like inscriptions, readable yet non-verbal. By suspending language between legibility and image, her talk redefines what it means to “read,” expanding our sense of text as both material and message.
Shir Meller-Yamaguchi’s Visual Scripts talk presents an exhibition curated by the speaker in Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian art, exploring the intersection of writing and painting, where language becomes visual. Tracing the origins of script from pictorial forms in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, it highlights how writing evolved from sacred, elite knowledge into a system of abstract representation. The exhibition presents Israeli artists who transform ancient scripts into contemporary visual languages—oscillating between personal marks and cultural signs—revealing how the pictographic roots of writing still resonate today, bridging spirit, image, and thought across time and culture.
Evgeniya Vezhlyan in her presentation Text and book: between thing and medium, will discuss how audiovisual media create new frames for perceiving text in its materiality, and how the cultural meanings of the book as a medium are changing at the boundaries of spatial representations of text.
Together, the speakers expose text as a mutable organism inhabiting the threshold between sign and image. Their talks reveal how language, when unsettled from its conventional functions, becomes both matter and medium — reframing our understanding of reading, perception, and meaning within a hybrid ecology of art, science, and culture.
BIOS
Nadia Adina Rose
Israel
Artist and poet. As an artist, Nadia Adina Rose creates textile and multimedia installations that transform the landscape into a deeply personal experience. Her works explore immigration, wandering, and transitions between countries and cultures.
As a poet writing in a language that is not her mother tongue, she reads the environment as signals, hieroglyphs, and secret codes meant to transmit information. Thus, her works give rise to forms resembling asemic writing, where text is shaped by intuition.
Rose holds BFA degrees from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (1994), and an M.Ed. in art education from the Midrasha School of Art, Beit Berel Academic College (2012). Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Israel and around the world, including The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, Wilfrid Museum (HaZore’a), Museum of Philistine Culture (Ashdod), Eretz Israel Museum (Tel Aviv), etc. Nadia-Adina has won awards both as a creator in the field of plastic arts and as a poet who has published several poetry books.
Shir Meller-Yamaguchi
Israel
Since 2005, Shir Meller-Yamaguchi has served as curator of the Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian Art, where she has developed exhibitions that bring contemporary Israeli and Asian artists into dialogue with the museum’s renowned Asian art collection.
She holds a B.A. in Art from Haifa University, a Curatorial Diploma from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK. In addition to her curatorial work, she has lectured in Tel-Aviv University’s Museum Studies program and in the Curatorship and Visual Thought program at Seminar HaKibbutzim.
Meller-Yamaguchi has also specialized in interactive and experimental exhibition formats. Notable projects include Dadalab (Janco-Dada Museum, 1995), Eye to I (Israel Museum, 2018), and Time (Museum of Islamic Art, Jerusalem, 2020).
Dr. Evgeniya Vezhlyan
Israel
Evgeniya Vezhlyan is a PhD candidate in Philology and an MA in Sociology. Her areas of expertise include the history of modern Russian literature, the sociology of literature, and literary theory. Until 2022, she headed the Department of Modern Literature at the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2022, she emigrated to Israel. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Bar-Ilan University, studying Russian-language literary communities and institutions in Israel.
Chair:
Galina Bleikh
Israel
A multidisciplinary artist. Her creative expertise spans a rich spectrum of artistic domains, encompassing AI, 3D modeling, AR and VR, bio-art, generative art, and more. At the heart of her artistic pursuit lies a fascination with the profound synergy between the emerging artificial reality and its transformative interaction with human experience through art. Galina graduated from the Stieglitz St. Petersburg State Academy of Art and Industry (MA). Since 1993, lives in Jerusalem. Galina is a cofounder of the INEMEA Association for Art, Culture, and Education and the INEMEA Jerusalem Art & Science lab. Since 2024, Galina becomes a host of Leonardo/ISAST Laser Talks Jerusalem. Galina takes part in many exhibitions and conferences. Among them: The CICA Museum of Modern Art, Republic of Korea (3 group exhibitions, 2023, 2024, 2025, and solo, 2021), Jerusalem Biennale (co-curator and participating artist, 2023–2024), ArtPlatform-On, Republic of Korea (2022), NordArt, Germany (2019), Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (2018), LA Art Show USA (2013), etc.
bleikh.art
Moderator:
Daria Kesler
Israel
Cross-disciplinary researcher and artist. Works with human and machine-generated texts, sounds, documentaries, scents, and video art. Daria is interested in using modern technologies and science to spread empathy towards all species. She wants to explore new ways of co-living between technology, human, plants, and animals. Education: Master of Art&Science (Inovice), ITMO, Russia, Major studies in Hybrid (Technological and Bio) Art.
SPONSORS
Israel