The second Environmental Biennale has been underway in downtown Tel Aviv for a few weeks now, and it is due to run through June 13. Visitors to Dizengoff Center looking to get some shopping in between and betwixt work, school, and daily chores have been treated to an eye-catching display of mostly outsized works of art with ecology and the preservation of dear old Mother Nature at their core.
Despite the apparent discord between consumerism and the forces of nature, Nava Benny firmly believes that the exhibition is exactly where it should be. “This is where we need to promote environmental issues,” she says. “Here, where modern life takes place and not in some remote village where everyone declares they are vegan.”
As someone who has led a plant-based dietary life for over a decade, I didn’t exactly go along with the stereotypical idea that you have to live in rustic climes to adopt a more nature-friendly ethos. But I got her contextual point loud and clear.
I learn that the powers that be at Dizengoff Center are pulling out all the stops to ensure that the shopping mall runs along environmentally friends lines. “Here, they are taking serious measures to reduce energy consumption, and they recycle almost everything,” Benny adds. The center also has a rooftop full of green ventures, from beekeeping to solar energy contraptions, and a plant nursery. It also produces masses of compost, some of which it uses itself, and the rest it sells to green-thumbed members of the public.
Environmental Biennale: 50 Degrees in the Shade
Those were indeed encouraging words from the curator of the biennale, which, this time out, goes by the self-explanatory title “50 Degrees in the Shade.” That is also the name of an alluring work by Shira Stein, one of 13 in the biennale, which comprises discarded malleable detritus of palm tree trunks in a seductive-looking triptych. The work, which sits in something that looks like a makeshift three-parter shop window, offers deceptive aesthetics whereby the core raw material looks more akin to leather than the detritus of a towering item of vegetation.
The dimensions of the vast cavernous host building offered the artists plenty of physical room for maneuver. They grabbed that with both hands and ran with it, in every which direction. Shahar Kusht’s Ne’elamot (Vanishing) kinetic sculpture rams the existential challenge issue home in no uncertain terms.
Stretching a full three meters across, Ne’elamot addresses approaching cataclysmic eventualities resulting from the gradual disappearance of bees from the world and how that is exacerbated by the use of chemical pesticides and the loss of ecosystems. Kusht’s installation features mechanical objects made of metal, which give the impression they have donned armor in preparation to wage war for their very survival. They move their wings in a way that lies somewhere between a butterfly movement and a desperate attempt to escape.
“The delicate sound of their wings reminds us how fragile the natural system is, and how much the human species depends on it,” Benny notes. Ne’er a truer word was spake.DID I mention that the works are large?
Architect and multidisciplinary artist Tagit Klimor’s Hashalem Hachaser (The Missing Whole) installation is positively huge, rising through a couple of floors of the shopping mall. The predominantly red creation is made of recycled XP piping and jute, with the latter bearing prints of collages of urban, agricultural, and rural scenes.
The title of the creation references the delicate nature of coexistence between Homo sapiens and the natural world. “The reciprocal relationship between nature, industrialization, and people incorporates built-in substraction,” the exhibition text notes. Klimor is keen to encourage – if not cajole – us into remedial action.
“Nature and humankind with it are a single living tissue which aims to achieve balance and restore fullness. But it [humankind] forgets that every day. Restoring that which is missing, to recreate the fullness, requires effort, and we are lazy.” Well said.
There is a wide variety of installations and styles dotted around the mall. Ovadia Binyasho’s long illustration Dehaya is a curious affair. It takes its physical form from the lenticular creations initiated by now 97-year-old Yaacov Agam and draws the public’s attention to life beneath the waves. More to the point, it highlights the damage we are inflicting on coral reefs around the world, including in our very own Red Sea off the coast of Eilat.
Lenticular paintings protrude from their base in parallel, ridged triangular shapes so that the observer sees a completely different scene or pattern, depending on whether they are looking from the right or the left. That adds a sense of animation to Dehaya, and also ensures that we get the distressing ecological picture.
“If you look at this from one side, you see the colorful coral; but when you pass by and get a perspective from another direction, you see how it turns to black and white,” Benny explains. “A spectacular and vibrant world is disappearing and being bleached,” she adds. “The visual, colorful entity that illustrates life as opposed to the white nothingness, that is what is now happening beneath the sea.”
The mall roof not only houses earnest environmental initiatives. It also sports a fascinating, rich mural by Ruth (Ru) Boazson called Nightlife. Boazson clearly invested great effort in compiling the work, using raw materials ranging from soil and ground chalk to sand, straw, and clay. The Jerusalem-born artist uses the creation to draw attention to wildlife that abounds in urban Tel Aviv, in parks and apartment building backyards, both of the diurnal and nocturnal varieties.
“The work offers a place for the healing powers of nature within the built-up expanse that surrounds us,” she says. It is an intentionally tactile affair. “Making contact with the ground reminds us to renew our faith and connection to the place and Earth as a home; and the landscapes of urban nature allude to the constant presence that beats and lives around us all the time.”
The exhibition also includes screenings of several suitably themed animated films, which appeal to shoppers of all ages and are as entertaining as they are instructive. In fact, the same could be said for all the exhibits.
