The exhibition Suicidal Nurit emerged from an encounter between two artists who meet here for the first time: sculptor and musician Avinoam Sternheim and artist Tama Goren. From the outset, it was clear the two share a conceptual common ground. For them, the act of creating occurs in an intermediary space between reality and imagination; a realm where folklore, legends, and personal stories recharge through materials and images from contemporary reality.

This shared language is reinforced by the two artists’ connection to the world of theater. In the past year, Sternheim has been constructing scenery for experimental plays, working with discarded industrial materials from which he assembled scenes. Concurrently, Goren began creating miniature settings — three-dimensional painted spaces that serve as tiny theater sets. In both cases, the artistic act functions to build a world: a clearly delineated sphere, charged and narrative, which invites observation and a continued presence.

The exhibition’s narrative is bolstered by the tension between the artists’ material and visual languages. Sternheim’s crude, direct, and intense sculpture, made of industrial waste and objects that have lost their place, stands in contrast to Goren’s delicate works, in mediums such as watercolor, papercuts, and embroidery, populated by images from folklore and tragicomic narratives. The meeting between the weighty, damaged material, and fragile, poetic imagery generates a complex and congested world, where intimacy and threat, playfulness and melancholy, all coexist.

The exhibition is designed as a multisensory experience and an orchestrated journey. The artworks are installed as distinct scenes, surrounded by theatrical lighting and sound. They lead viewers through various spaces which gradually formulate an imaginary, dreamlike story. The story is neither linear nor clear-cut; it grows out of a cumulation of images, materials, and sensations.

The exhibition’s name already hints at the complex topics the works address: constant motion between fear and humor, between melancholy and playfulness. Thus, the exhibition crystalizes into a complete intermediary space: a world that does not attempt to solve or decipher life’s troubles, but rather offers art as a continuous act of coping, absorbing, and transforming. In this process creating makes it possible to remain within contradiction, to hold onto tensions without resolving them, and to learn from them about how imagination, material, and narrative create the possibility of existence within a loaded reality.