Art as a Tool for Healing
A new exhibition at The Isreal Museum, Jerusalem aims to creat a space for personal shared legacies.
Throughout the country, many are still grappling with the events of October 7 and its aftermath. Seeking creative ways to harness the healing power of art, the Israel Museum’s new exhibition The Dawn of Darkness: Elegy in Contemporary Art offers visitors an inclusive, encompassing space to engage with the effects of this period. The unusual exhibition presents profound, poetic reflections of elegy found in the work of contemporary artists – expressions of loss and grief; poignant memories of family, friends, home, and landscape; and the absence of what was and is no longer.
The works on display, all from the Museum’s important collection of contemporary art, draw visitors in to a place that is both meditative and powerful. The hundreds of bright gerbera daisies in Preserve Beauty by Anya Gallaccio slowly wither, rot, and dry out: a symbol of beauty and life, the flowers are also a reminder of the transience of life. Melik Ohanian's clock entitledTrouble Time(s), with its minute hand moving rapidly behind a blurred glass, underscores the feeling that time is running out. Entering a dark space, visitors encounter GHARDY, Local Voices by Yehudit Sasportas. In this immersive six-channel video installation, each screen relates to one of the artist’s siblings (GHARDY is an acronym for their names). Sasportas’s work resonates especially strongly with the present day, as the loss of her late brother Avi, who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1989, is woven into the fabric of an unsettling work filled with longing.
Other eminent artists featured in the exhibition include: Christian Boltanski, Joshua Borkovsky, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Anthony Goicolea, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Talia Keinan, Jonathan Monk, and Gal Weinstein.
Each of the works was created out of the specific context of the artist’s personal world, yet also carries a symbolic and universally resonant meaning. Presented together, they embrace visitors with a contemplative space, offering places to connect to shared emotions or experience their own private sorrow.