אֶנוּמָה אֶלִישׁ

13.04.2018 - 30.05.2018  

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Yuval Atzili | Gustavo Sagorsky | Mor Perez | Chen Sheinberg

Curator : Asaf Gam Hacohen

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Enuma Elish (from Babylonian: 'When on High') is the Babylonian creation myth. The story was discovered between the antiquities of the city of Nineveh in 1849, written upon seven well-preserved pottery tablets.

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In the exhibition Enuma Elish, with the participation of artists Yuval Atzili, Gustavo Sagorsky, Mor Perez and Chen Sheinberg, a modern myth was built, in which, as in ancient mythologies, life and death serve to create the world or to explain the world around us. The exhibition intermittently explores, deconstructs and rebuilds a contemporary masculine worldview and masculinity in the #MeToo era, replete with contradictions which can be described as fragile yet violent, and located on a diffuse border between certainty and doubt.

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Each of the works chosen for the exhibition represents a different aspect of the constructed mythology, a parallel that resonates with the ancient myths. In all the works, a line is drawn that connects the human with the beastly, making it difficult to distinguish between them.

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The examination of the works from this perspective enables us to see the image of the man-angel in the work of Yuval Atzili, as a kind of anti-Icarus whose wings weigh on him, leaving him bedridden. In his video work, the marionette-bird dances heavily, its limp body dominated by a force majeure. In the Babylonian myth, the god Marduk kills his mother Tiamat then forms heaven and earth from her divided body in a process that breaks down gender equality and perpetuates the patriarchal rule. Chen Sheinberg's work, the praying female mantis is the one who devours and destroys the body of the dead insect. In Gustavo Sagorsky's photo, it is difficult to understand whether the man is holding on to or is trapped by the pink feminine-childish float. The body of Sagorsky's straw man is materialized through the camera, suspended forever between heaven and earth. The photographs of the fetuses by Mor Perez, a missed potential, an extreme marker of infertility and barrenness, floating in black space as a mythological creature, not yet human but already similar enough, echo the myth in which Abzu eats his children, Marduk's brothers. The sequence ends with a photograph by Atzili, an image of Pieta, in which a half-naked young man is cradling a flamingo bird's body in his hands, her head hanging on his shoulder, but he offers no consolation or hope.

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Some perceive the myth as a constitutive story of consciousness, which contributes to shaping the identity and perception of a particular group which believes in and adheres to the myth. I see in Enuma Elish a myth that creates a conscious struggle between the genders which is reflected in the exhibition. The Creators' struggle (in terms of the question 'Who is the Creator?') ends with the disintegration of masculine consciousness from which remain only defeated leftovers. This exhibition calls for the establishment of a new myth in which consciousness is not dichotomous - masculine/feminine -  but flexible, fluid, aspiring to return to 'when on high', when the skies were nameless, When not one of the gods had been formed.