The social field today is undergoing new and forceful processes. Dionysus and Apollo serve as a fundamental framework for this transformation, which represents awakening—a recognition of harsh reality. Yet within this awakening lies, inherently, a collective organization and the accumulation of mass power—a great Dionysian force: intoxication by the very possibility of public sobering. The social chaos has exposed a state that spiraled out of control—an obsessive, blind pursuit of financial capability that only enables a basic, “normal” life. Acknowledging this situation signifies the sobering morning after, in which the masses gather and generate Dionysian power.

Will the masses know how to harness these intoxicating forces to achieve real goals?

Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication, represents loss of control, surrender to instinct, but also awakening and daylight sobering.

The exhibition explores the spaces in which we surrender to the power of impulse—simple, raw, and addictive. These are places where states of consciousness shift, pulled by seductive, intoxicating, and sexual forces, filled with ritual elements that ultimately lead to renewed sobriety and a search for the altar’s horns—for salvation.

In the exhibition, the myth is deconstructed and rebuilt through contemporary principles: the direct language of painting, small but powerful sculptures, orgies and ritual ceremonies expressed in repetitive video works. The Dionysian state allows no space for guilt or morality: intoxication and temptation eliminate any attempt at rational thought or alert conscience—this is the ultimate freedom.

The exhibition offers a wide gaze into the backstage of the self—to the place of longing, addiction, surrender. A place where the day calls for freedom, fully given over to the body and the urge, to the point of losing rational faculties. The morning after may then be unexpectedly harsh. In such a state, the waste is enormous: a gaping abyss opens between action and power, between motivation and ability, between potential and impotence—a full throttle in neutral. At times, the neutral slips into gear: the deceptive sense of reality leads inevitably into negative paths—into destructive implementation in real life. In the Dionysian gaze, what once seemed wonderful may reveal itself as an irreversible mistake.

The exhibition illuminates the myth and examines it through a weaving of circular patterns that both deconstruct and reconstruct it:

- **Yiftach Bleski** presents the focal point of fire and the black smoke of a burnt-out car in a familiar earthy landscape.  

- **Michal Hadar** builds a red field of sponge-like “penis flowers.”  

- **Rani Pardes** unsettles with paintings of androgynous women marching in a parade from the underworld.  

- **Rivka Quah** offers fleshy, dark paintings—blacker than black.  Even the seemingly gentle image is wrapped in darkness.

- **Tsuki Garbian** shows erased portraits.  

- **Niv Bornstein** paints a massive collage of obsessively oral figures in nearly every imaginable way.  

- **Video artist Vivian Han** (China), in the work *Stockholm*, performs with persistence and severity: her body movements resemble a painful ritual bearing hope. Stockholm syndrome is when a hostage develops affection for their captor.

**Tam-Tomer Goldberg**, in the video installation *Altar Horns*, places the altar-bed wrapped in sacred white mist within a temporal dimension. White steam conceals the object itself—the altar—and it’s only a matter of time until it evaporates, dissolves, and leaves the horns abandoned, fallen, a testimony and memory of a disappearing dry ice altar—fading along with the ancient world.

**Merrick Lackner** applies expressive brushstrokes, piling thick layers of paint on his canvas, defying format boundaries. A classical portrait becomes under his brush a massive pool of color, as if wallowing in its own blood. His expressive style of painting is Dionysian at its core—uninhibited and wild.

Greek mythology tells of Dionysus, son of Zeus, king of the gods, and Semele, a mortal woman and daughter of the King of Thebes. Dionysus was half-god, half-human. In myth, he is described as the god of wine, sex, and fertility. In his realm were many institutionalized women and devoted mothers who, during spring festivals, drank copious wine. Dionysus led them into a night of lust, drugs, and instinct. Like a professional seducer, he drew them into an ecstatic orgy under the influence of substances, dressed in animal hides, beating drums, dancing. These dances pushed the women into trance-like madness, climaxing in the tearing apart of a bull (symbolizing Dionysus) and eating its raw flesh. (According to myth, Dionysus was dismembered by the Titans at Hera’s command.) Far from the city, burned by its own conservatism—perhaps necessarily so.

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