Hansen | הנסן

“Above Water” is an idiom suspended between opposing states. One gestures toward new life, exposure, and capability; the other evokes scarcity, destruction, and obliteration. Held together, these states articulate a condition of estrangement – of not quite belonging – within a newly formed reality. Water is both a life-giving and destructive element, and so too is the act of being removed from it: a gesture that may rescue, yet at the same time wound or devastate. The works in the exhibition have been brought above water: displaced from their habitats and original contexts – and gathered here to form a new space: still, hushed, and suspended.

The works in the exhibition unfold a wide arc of fateful events: birth and drowning, scarcity and erosion, the transformation of one form of life into another. In Wandering, Ofer Romano’s horse sculptures, originally conceived as floats for the waters of the Ga’aton Stream, appear to sink into the gallery’s stone floor, caught in a suspended moment of drowning. Yet the frozen gravity of the scene is unsettled, as the horses also resemble oversized chess pieces, hovering between peril and play. Daphne Kluger’s bleached corals in Existence seem dry and lifeless, yet are fashioned from wool, cotton, and acrylic – materials that grant them a renewed existence, soft, fragile, and consoling. In Orit Raff’s work, the church bell of the legendary city of Rungholt, said to have sunk into the depths of the North Sea, continues to sway with underwater currents. An inverse gesture unfolds in her work Sea Trumpet, where taking it out of the water allows it to produce sound, replacing the life that once inhabited it. In Venus in the Valley, Zohar Tal Inbar draws a line between Renaissance imagery and kibbutz life: Venus does not emerge from sea foam, but steps forth from her shell into the field, into the rituals of harvest; Ofra Eyal presents two oil paintings, Milk Jug and Sugar Bowl,  where the objects step away from their everyday function, opening a window to distant worlds and other times; Tomer Laham’s Whale  conjures the presence of a marine giant, only to reveal itself again as a light, delicate textile; whereas Lior Shalev’s Whales take the form of decorated birthday cakes set afloat in the sea, drifting on a slow journey of dissolution.