In a period fraught by war, the world around us transformed into a place where imagination and anxiety intertwined, with no clear boundary between the two. The reality outside crept into every aspect of our internal lives. The Labubu doll emerged in this space — cute and colorful, yet grimacing and sharp-toothed. At first, focusing on this colorful plushie might seem to stand in stark contrast to our daily experience of threats and violence, like something lighthearted, unsuited to our times.

Labubu is marketed as a children’s doll but is a collector’s item for adults to the same extent. It emphasizes the primeval’s place in our imaginations. It is appropriate for all ages, and appeals to our need to protect, as well as our need to be protected by inanimate objects. This is precisely the zone where reality and imagination become intertwined: The zone where, during the years of war, children’s games filled with hostages as part of the narrative, children built bomb shelters with blocks, and battles between imaginary characters acted out real-life fears. This applied no less to the adult world, where leisure activities became infused with repressed signs of trauma.

Over time, the contradiction between Labubu’s qualities proved as the key to a deeper understanding of reality. The link between cuteness and horror, so prominent in Labubu, directly echoes the conflict we are all living: an attempt to create a safe space in a world that insists on menacing. The toy, instead of serving as a counterpoint to the war or life’s troubles, became a testimony to how imagination and violence can coexist in the same space. Thus, Labubu is not just a fleeting trend, but a tool reflecting a generation raised in an unbearable reality, and the doll processes this reality through an image simultaneously containing sweetness, cruelty, and a constant shattering of the boundaries between the two. In this exhibition, the members of Binyamin Gallery react, each in their own way, to the doll and to reality.

Shlomit Liver chose to paint the beast within her and externalize aggression and anger. This act, the artist testifies, required significant effort, and came with an understanding that one must learn to express anger. Irit Barel Bassan merged an old relief she had in her studio, of squeegee blades, with a new relief of the Labubu character. The encounter between the different components created a hybrid as well as a jail: The plushie seems like it is trying to escape from the blades, yet at the same time, the components come together into a single entity. Sarit Achtenberg painted figures emerging from deep darkness: horns, blurred face and embracing body, soft yet ominous shadows. The work was born from a world where the innocent childrens’ games of kids’ rooms are charged with horror, and the imagination itself is no longer a safe haven, rather yet another arena for processing and decomposing things. In a monumental triptych, Irit Abramovich joined René Magritte’s surrealist image of men in suits descending from the sky, which she replaced with Labubu dolls, together with a landscape of ruins, reminding us of the ravages of war. By distancing ourselves, we are able to cope with the sense that reality itself has become surreal. Similarly, Adi T. Hoffman painted a Vanitas — a sixteenth-century Flemish painting genre that marks time’s transience — but instead of the genre’s accepted skull image, she placed the plushie’s head in the painting. This representation of a world where the human body is replaced with a synthetic doll provides a contemporary interpretation of an artistic genre which places human mortality in the center. In Jonathan Levy’s video work, the artist is filmed climbing up winding stairs, and he has an unexpected encounter with a figure generated by the remnants of air-conditioning ducts. During the disturbing encounter, the industrial material almost takes on the presence of a living thing, which stares back at the artist. Tamar Sheaffer created a site that is puzzling, perhaps nightmarish, in which a package of wound plastic wrap seems like an apparition emerging from a chest of drawers. She offers a carefree view of how the monstrous and unsettling can coexist with the sweet and appealing. Doron Fishbein produced a video work where a young woman with a beaming smile presents some object outside of the frame. Thus, the presenter herself becomes a subject without an object, the main emphasis remaining on consumer society itself and how it covers up complex feelings though empty images. Inbal Cohen Hamo presents a series of dolls marketed for gender reveal parties, which she cast in epoxy resin cubes, together forming one large cube of floating babies. In another work, the artist presents a baby doll positioned in a pose that is ostensibly highly protected, yet its presence creates an uncanny sensation, perhaps even an image of mortality. Efrath Bouana exhibits a painting of a couple playing with rubber duckies in a bathtub, encircled by a world that is falling apart. In this work, the artist seeks to make room for fear, not as weakness but rather as recognition of the legitimacy of suppressed human emotion. Finally, Michal Blayer shows a series of “bobblehead dogs” wrapped in netting used to protect glass bottles, covered in burnt branches and objects she collected in forests hit by missiles. The artist points to the absurdity of existence, where the realm of innocently strolling through nature has been ravaged and transformed into a debris field, while human protection happens far away, in enclosed bomb shelters.