Beyond Good and Evil

The opening of a cultural institution, modest as it may be, in Israel of 2011, is no small matter. Culture, if it registers at all on the radar of local consciousness, appears as a faint signal — and the recognition of the importance of visual art is the faintest of all. Thus, the opening of a new gallery by a collective of artists who are not driven by aspirations of wealth, but who seek to create another environment where it is possible to exhibit, to make mistakes, to sample, to get confused, to surprise — is reason enough for a celebration.

The opening exhibition of Binyamin Gallery introduces all nine members of the collective together. This will not be the gallery’s policy: in future exhibitions, artists who are not part of the founding group will also be presented, as well as solo exhibitions and various collaborations, not necessarily involving members of the core group.

So why start with *wild beasts*? Why set out with the bad and the bestial, instead of the good and the humane?

The works in the exhibition unabashedly present the other side of reality — the bleeding, flawed, non-normative, ugly, malicious side — the side that repels rather than flirts or seduces. Perhaps because at this murky, violent, and blunt moment and place, this is what emerges: decapitated, bleeding heads; a stammering collage-painting; a non-normative, monstrous portrait emerging from non-normative material (a mattress); the blank stare of a blind dancer; a cow that swallowed a whale that swallowed infants; and a mad dog that seems to have escaped from a story we have already heard.

Or perhaps, because just as the renovation of the gallery was completed, it is precisely the black, ugly crow — the one that stubbornly examines its reflection in the builder’s trowel resting on a concrete block, a remnant of another reality — that, from within the plaster and the blocks, heralds the teeming life beneath the surface and signals the entry of art into a new space, a new beginning.

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