Cohen's body is subject to constant changes. She has rheumatoid arthritis. The artwork she creates through photography deals with thoughts about the compatibility between the person she is and her body. She notices that as the structure of her hands changes, the pace of speech and walking also changes. The physical changes began to serve her personality, the pace dictated by the body determined her pace of thought. As an artist, she photographs performative actions of her body in video and stills, and then chooses a single image and processes it. For Cohen, the physical, performative act, is also an act of spirit - she believes she can make the body become her characters and vice versa - both as a photographer and as a person - the body serves personality and the personality serves body.

Cohen reads “All the readiness to run and jump and fight that there is in a well-trained body today”. She decides to perform a physical action that goes beyond the capacity of her body. To train herself for an effort that transcends endurance. To allow strenuous physical labor to produce an act of spirit. The daily practice to which Robert Musil [in “The Man Without Qualities”] refers is a kind of agenda, habit, which has the potential to lead to change in the given physical structure and in the internal personality structure. The training allows the body to remember, experience and not be surprised at the time of the action. Cohen sets training days with a partner - she will carry his thin and tall body, as her own, beyond the impossible.

Chen Cohen's body is degenerating. She reads pages out of “The Man Without Qualities” and looks at photographs of fossils. She thinks of her body as one that can petrify. The fossils, she says, capture life within them - they are a grave, and the body, motionless and untrained, will turn her too into stone or statue.

Ilanit Konopny