While the theoretical connections between Jacquard loom weaving and computer science—anchored in the binary codes behind both—are well established, any correlation between tapestry-making and robotics would be much less obvious. Noa Eshkol, a dancer, choreographer and movement theorist born 100 years ago in a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee is the unlikely pioneering link between the two. Following years of dance practice, Eshkol, who had been analysing the movement of human and animal bodies, developed the Eshkol-Wachman movement notation (EWMN) with her then-student, architect Avraham Wachman, in 1958. Their system broke down movement to atomised elements represented within a spherical field around the body. It enabled the notation of dance in space and time in a system that remains to this day far more precise than others and is still applied in a range of fields, from physical therapy to autism diagnosis, animation, and yes, even robotics. But in addition to Eshkol’s work around dance and choreography, she also created hundreds of tapestries. Quilted from scraps, these works are records of an erstwhile Israeli textile industry, of trends and tastes—from interiors to outerwear—arranged to chart the movements of patterns, compositions and colours.

“Eshkol was a trailblazer—not only in the context of dance and art, but also in the context of feminism,” says dancer Mor Bashan, one of Eshkol’s successors and the director of the Noa Eshkol archives in Holon, Israel, at a talk in Berlin earlier this year. Just after the end of World War II in 1946, Eshkol travelled alone as a young woman to study with the Austro-Hungarian dancer Rudolf Laban in England to learn his Labanotation system, which she soon found insufficient. There, she also met Moshe Feldenkrais, inventor of the eponymous method. From Feldenkrais, she internalised how to improve the intentionality of movement by cultivating self-awareness.

It (tapestry-making) began as a purely personal impulse to produce something and not as something that involves an intellectual decision... – Noa Eshkol

To mark the centenary of Eshkol’s birth, a number of events and exhibitions have been staged in Europe and Israel, including several notable preludes in 2023. At Art Basel’s Parcours Night last year, dancers from the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group—which formed again after Eshkol’s passing in 2007, with some of its surviving original members—performed her choreographies amidst an installation of her vibrant, multi-coloured wall tapestries. Two months later, in August 2023, the dance company performed again in Berlin at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and hosted an open workshop on the Eshkol-Wachman notational system. To the contemporary viewer, the performances might appear solemnly pared back, minimalistic and even postmodern. The key to immersing oneself in these choreographies is in Eshkol’s understanding of dance. She regarded it as a pure art form that requires no narrative embellishment, set design, costumes, or music. She thought of the human body itself as a microtonal instrument and her compositions relied on seriality and polyphonic forms, be it within one dancer’s movement or in relation to other performers.

The centenary exhibitions culminated in the museum show No Time to Dance at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, which ran from March through August 2024, and in the gallery show Noa Eshkol, textile traces, currently on view at neugerriemschneider, also in Berlin. The gallery works closely with the foundation that manages Eshkol’s archive; located in her former home in Holon, the archive itself was the key to collaborations that have brought Eshkol’s work to an international audience. American artist Sharon Lockhart (also represented by neugerriemschneider) became aware of Eshkol’s work on a research trip to Israel in 2011-12. Immediately captivated by the ground-breaking research and scope of Eshkol’s output, Lockhart produced a photographic series around the spheres Eshkol used to develop her notational system (some of these photographs were included in the exhibition at the Georg Kolbe museum). Lockhart’s gallerists soon followed the artist’s tip and visited the archive themselves, where they discovered the textiles, which, until then, garnered little attention compared to the wider context of Eshkol’s legacy.

Indeed, Eshkol began working with textiles later in her life. When the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, one of her dancers was enlisted. Amidst the bloodshed and violence, she halted the dance company’s activity. “This is no time to dance,” she announced. The tapestries became the outlet for her restless mind and for her visual thinking in shapes and patterns. She would lay out found material on the floor and arrange scraps on its surface; she’d never alter the size or shape of the fabrics, only unpick stitches. Her dancers would be sent on “rag patrol” missions, to collect leftovers from textile factories, deadstock and scraps. Today, this practice would be described as ecologically aware, but at the time it was motivated by Eshkol’s interest in documenting the everyday, as captured in fabrics. It is estimated that until her death, Eshkol created around 1,800 tapestries. Oftentimes, she would arrange the compositions with pins and her company would stitch them. It is possible that some works in the archive are still pinned, and not yet stitched.

There are 22 works on view at neugerriemschneider, some of which have never before been exhibited. In the smallest of the gallery’s three rooms, a group of rectangular works are suspended from the ceiling. With many of them bearing patterns resembling branches, leaves and natural landscapes, the installation evokes a magical, multicolour forest. This hanging also allows viewers to see the works in the round, exposing the stitches alongside Eshkol’s signature. In the two adjacent rooms, large-scale tapestries are given the breathing space required to take in the full psychedelia of their details. Here too, several works contain shapes that evoke nature. A magnetising piece titled Geula’s Tree, created in the 1990s, uses the base fabric’s design of orange, yellow and red blossoms such that the scene appears like a fruit-bearing tree in bloom. In the next room, the different tapestries all appear to contain spirals and circular patterns. Made during the 1980s, the piece Folk Dance inspires synesthesia, implying the dynamism of movement and sound.

Although the textile works became so central to her practice, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Eshkol refers to her tapestry-making in only one text in her archive. “It began as a purely personal impulse to produce something and not as something that involves an intellectual decision,” she writes. “That hasn’t changed, but over time, from the accumulation of complete works that were hung and presented to the public grew a kind of ideology. It's not something you can teach or give academic credit for, because there is nothing to teach here. There are no rules, no theory — just passion.”