Form the Light, and Create Darkness

The exhibition “Form the Light, and Create Darkness” invites the viewer on a journey between different media in Israel Rabinovitz’s oeuvre. Borrowing images from the Israeli-Zionist ethos and from local myths, he manipulates and challenges them.

Rabinovitz reformulates the intricacy of the local reality, toying with the history and memory of our primal patterns of knowledge, thereby attempting to undermine nostalgic values in which the moral stand and doubts are stronger than the yearning for the past. He culls his raw materials like a collector, employing “souvenirs” made of olive wood from the Bezalel period and early Zionism, ancient local archaeological fragments, fire inscriptions, and rusty relics from the field adjacent to his house.

The exhibition introduces questions about locale (place) and localism, about the symbolic meanings of real and fabricated archaeology, and about the validity of Israeli rituals in social and cultural contexts. It blends materials, times, and places, illusively oscillating between real and imaginary, while intertwining private-personal and public-collective memory and history. Israel’s (the artist and the state) imagery longs for better days still ahead. Until then, he posits an acute mirror before local current affairs.