This painting explores the invisible world of brain injury: the fracture between who we were, who we remember being, and who we become after survival.
The work originates from my own experience of a catastrophic traffic accident, multiple brain surgeries, clinical death, and the long process of returning to consciousness and rebuilding a sense of self. That experience fundamentally changed my understanding of memory, identity and perception, and later became the subject of my book, Am I Dead or Alive?
At the centre of the painting is a human face constructed through fragmented geometric forms. The fragmentation is not intended to depict a broken person, but a consciousness being reorganized—a mind attempting to reconstruct itself after trauma. Above the face, an open doorway appears within the head: a passage into an internal space that neither medicine nor language can completely describe. The words before, after, memory, absence, awake, return and becoming trace the uncertain territory between these states.
The medical cross situates the work within the reality of injury and treatment, while the vivid colours deliberately resist the darkness of the subject. They represent life continuing inside disruption: neuroplasticity, adaptation, possibility and the strange beauty of becoming someone new.
The painting was created for a fundraising initiative supporting Kehilat Or, an Israeli organization for people affected by brain injury, where I volunteer. In this way, a deeply personal experience becomes collective. The work is not simply a depiction of survival; it asks what survival actually means when the body returns, but memory, identity and consciousness no longer return in exactly the same form.
