\u201cAs I was walking among the fires of
\nhell, delighted with the enjoyments
\nof Genius, which to Angels look like
\ntorment and insanity, I collected
\nsome of their Proverbs.\u201d
\n\u2014William Blake, The Marriage of
\nHeaven and Hell
\nIn Judaism, Sheol is the netherworld. Human beings descend there after death by God\u2019s will\u2014 \u201cThe Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the\u00a0grave and raises up\u201d (1 Samuel 2:6)\u2014 and may therefore ascend once again to the land of the living. Sheol is also Abaddon, the place of destruction, and the abyss of oblivion, the place concealed from humans, to which they have no access. Such ideas find even more acute expression in Greek mythology, where the World of\u00a0the Dead is called by many names, including Hades, after the \u201cinvisible\u201d god of the underworld. In this mythology, the souls of the dead belong to Hades, their ruler, who forbids them from leaving his kingdom. Any attempt to bring someone back from Hades is doomed to failure, as one recalls from the stories of Persephone and of Orpheus and Eurydice. Such myths leave the struggle between life and death undecided. Orpheus did manage to go down to the underworld and extract his loved one from there, but at the last moment he looked back and lost her forever. And the beautiful Persephone, the personification of fertility\u00a0and abundance on earth, was abducted by Hades, who tricked her by feeding her some pomegranate seeds before letting her exit his kingdom. Since she tasted\u00a0food in the underworld, she was obliged to return to it every winter, forever trapped between the kingdom of light and the bowls of the earth.\u00a0What is a museum collection if not an underworld of art pieces kept, untouched, under the earth, like corpses, waiting for the eye of a curator-god to choose\u00a0and bring them back to life, if only for a few months, before they are returned to the nether regions once again? The museum\u2019s registrar may be likened to Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries the souls of the newly deceased across the river Styx, which surrounds the world of the dead and divides it from the world of the living.
\nEden Auerbach-Ofrat\u2019s new work explores this notion in two spaces: the museum\u2019s permanent collection gallery and the hallway leading down to the collection\u2019s storage rooms. In these works, as in her previous pieces, the world of mythology and the actual world are intertwined. Auerbach-Ofrat grouped works from the collection of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art and her video likens the gallery to a river bank\u00a0which accompanies these works as they sail along the river Lethe\u2014the river of forgetfulness, another of the rivers of the Greek underworld. On the river bank\u00a0itself, the gallery\u2019s floor, stand sculptures, as if awaiting their time to sail, too. Another video, screened in the hallway leading down to the collection\u2019s storage rooms,\u00a0presents the point of view of those who are sailing to Hades\u2019 kingdom. Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, moves back and forth on the river bank, deterring those arriving and standing guard against anyone leaving the collection cave.\u00a0The aspiration of museums\u2014ostensibly contrary to that of Hades, who jealously hangs on to his subjects\u2014is to revitalize their collections, expose them to the light\u00a0of day and breathe new contextual and interpretive life into them. However, they are also fearful lest the pieces in their collections be harmed in the process, for\u00a0they are even more fragile in \u201cdeath\u201d than they were in life. Therefore, the wish to preserve them forever often trumps the desire to exhibit and return them to public\u00a0and cultural consciousness. Auerbach-Ofrat refers to the two-way movement between the underground space (storage room) and the upper one (exhibition\u00a0gallery), but does so from the point of view of the works of art. The onlookers become viewers in the full sense of the word, that is, viewers of a specter that is an inverted\u00a0reflection of our world. We observe forgetfulness as\u00a0if through the eyes of the sculptures, removed from\u00a0either the forgetfulness or the historical memory of the\u00a0collection\u2019s storage rooms only to remain abandoned\u00a0on shore.
\nUnlike other entities that inhabit the world\u00a0invoked by Auerbach-Ofrat, we may decide whether to\u00a0go out again into the light or remain in the darkness of\u00a0the gallery and turn our gaze directly on the abyss of the culture consigned to oblivion here and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.\u201d \u2014William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell In Judaism, Sheol is the netherworld. Human beings descend there after death by God\u2019s will\u2014 \u201cThe Lord brings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15417,"template":"","class_list":["post-15419","exhibitions","type-exhibitions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions\/15419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibitions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}