“Rewilding” 

Curator: Amalia Arieli

Rewilding is an ecological approach aimed at restoring wildness, not with the intention of returning nature to a former state, but to renew ecological processes. By extension, rewilding describes a condition in which things are allowed to reorganize themselves without a guiding hand, without imposing a fixed logic, form, or purpose. The aim is not to return to an original, primordial wildness, but rather to enable forces of life to emerge and unfold. There is
something sickly and distorted in rewilding—vegetation rising out of the inanimate, evasion of control while still using its systems, in other words: a mingling of orders. Like the grotesque, whose name comes from the dark material dwelling in a cave (grotto), the wild is neither balanced nor miraculous. It resembles a creature long suppressed that now sees the light of day.
Strangely attractive, the wild combines life systems that were never meant to merge. Like the feeling of disgust—born of mixing what belongs with what does not—it generates a movement that resists sharp divisions between us and them, human, animal, and machine, pure, filthy, and dull.
At the entrance to the exhibition, Eitan Ben-Moshe has created a sculpture specifically for the inner courtyard of Parterre. The inanimate, as in much of Ben Moshe’s work, merges temptation with repulsion, nuclear psychedelic beauty with organic healing materiality. At the other end, the exhibition closes with a series of prints by Ola Timer Kravchenko, telling a story of madness and revelation in a haunted forest. Creatures that may be dream-products serve as mentors, demons, and guiding figures in a spiritual journey where the protagonist is both victim and exalted being. Rewilding unsettles the perception that nature/God is a separate entity from “all that is polluted in the world.” Rewilding is as toxic as it is generative, life-giving, and life-destroying. Nature—or God—mingles in the game of abundance and ruin. In “World
Domination”, a small, spiky sculpture by Anna Sharon, the world’s ruling power adopts stylistic identities, for example, as a weapon. A crown merges with a clown’s hat, woven together in a military belt. The central space of the exhibition deals with the metamorphosis of the self—from the human to the thing/it—made possible through this collapse of boundaries. In Delphine Zorea’s drawing (“Untitled”), a tailed female figure bends under physical strain on high heels. The figure has two bodies: one naked, the other clothed, slightly shifted apart. There is overlap, yet also dissonance—contradictory desires, opposing interests, finding expression within one body’s limitations, or forced to exist through it. Leila Rose Bari removes a chandelier from her mother’s home and breathes into it a last gust of life. In Gilad Ashery’s drawing (“Jump”),
excessive wild power finds no outlet. Naama Doron Angel’s abundance of “Whistle-Flowers” obeys the urge to grow, becoming a field. Perhaps the same spirit blows in Regev Haim Pardo’s whistles. In his work “But how did it all begin?”, four whistles are bound together against a horsehide silhouette, indirectly referencing Mordechai Vanunu, the horse thief turned smuggler who revealed Dimona’s nuclear secrets. Rewilding, as proposed here, departs from the
romanticism of the natural, the pure, the native, or the authentic. It is a symbiosis—a complex, double-faced entity that grants as it consumes, that grows and regresses simultaneously. On the one hand, it recognizes beauty in nature; on the other, it regards it suspiciously and is unafraid to meddle.
Sivan Nishri’s glowing-color works present abstract forms in fluorescent light. Tzuf Ben-David’s work documents a floral piercing she performed on her tongue, displayed on an iPhone set upon a chiselled miniature table. Hadas Hay’s pair of swings appears as organic trunks turned into signs of fear and adolescent longing. The exhibition seeks to open a wild
field—where animate, inanimate, and vegetal are entwined and overtake one another. Perhaps this field is already here, submerged beneath our awareness. The deep principle of rewilding is to internalize nature not as an object but as a way of acting—a means of establishing a deeper, soberer freedom, fearless, in chains. In Matti Harel’s mytho-poetic work, the blue horizon seduces us to merge with it, while humanity clings at the brink of an abyss for one last moment. Michal Helfman engraves an image of Ponytail at an erotic distance from the moon, Romy Ben-Yosef casts bronze nuts concealing secrets, and Boris Laevsky hides a whisper in oil on wood. In all of these, baroque qualities and a play of darkness and light abound. The wild no longer dwells in lost forests or at the edges maps, but in the visible light, right here.
Nishri presents a series of radiant works that depict abstract forms in fluorescent light. In her paintings, a pictorial space unfolds where form becomes light — emerging from the material like a nuclear and psychedelic energy. The figure, the plant, and the abstract shape are inseparable, resonating as a symbiotic relationship between the human and the vegetal, between body and supernatural spirit. Each layer in Nishri’s paintings activates processes of decomposition and synthesis. The light in her works heals not because it is beautiful or serene, but because it acts like oxygen on the skin.