A tiny Mexican free-tailed bat is the protagonist driving Keren Gueller’s exhibition. Detaching its taxidermied body from the permanent display in Petach Tikva’s Man and Environment Museum, she formulates a fictitious biographical plot for it, which commences with Project X-Ray and concludes with a daring escape from a test facility and settling in a bat colony in the city of Petach Tikva. “As bats fly squealing in the hollow of some great cave, when one of them has fallen out of the cluster in which they hang,”^{1<\/sup> it is all the same, whether we are concerned with dissociation from nature; fallen out of from “the collection” which functions within a catalogued autonomous narrative; detachment from a body of knowledge in which all species have an equal status; or disconnection from an axiomatic taxonomic apparatus with methodical regulating values\u2014any type of falling out or dissociation elicits dread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}

Project X-Ray, better known as Bat Bomb Project, was\nconceived in the USA during World War II. It explored the possibility of\nreleasing bats carrying small incendiary bombs over the Japanese Empire, whose\nactivation was to set the paper and wood structures typical of Japanese\narchitecture on fire as they landed. The Mexican free-tailed bat, weighing 14\ngrams, was selected for the mission. Concurrently, a miniature incendiary bomb\nwas developed which contained napalm. The bomb’s efficacy was proven when a\ngroup of “armed” bats fled the test lab and set multiple fires in the\narea. In an experiment conducted in December 1943, the project was crowned a\nsuccess when an especially built demo-village was burned to the ground. In 1944,\ndevelopment of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project was completed.\nIn light of the more efficient and decisive alternative for\nthe termination of the war, Project X-Ray was\ncanceled, and the aircraft initially intended to carry the bats were adapted as\nvehicles for the launching of atomic bombs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The\nstuffed bat, whose flat and preserved manifestation lends it the aesthetic\nquality of an archival readymade document, while offering a realistic\nillustration of the appearance and perpetuation of death, quintessentially\nembodies the nature-culture dichotomy, and within it\u2014the patronizing philosophy\nand mastering approach to nature. Despite our familiarity with the way in which\nhuman imagination has appropriated the bat images\u2014along the contradictory range\nof sensations between horror, admiration, humor, and aversion, feelings that have\nbecome rooted in myths, prejudice, as well as the fictive character of Batman\nin comics\u2014the appropriation of the animal itself for the purpose of testing and\nresearch cannot but elicit disconcert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            According\nto John Berger, “this reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as\nwell as economic history, is<\/em> part\nof the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated\nproductive and consuming units. Indeed, during this period an approach to\nanimals often prefigured an approach to man.<\/em>“^{2<\/sup> In this laconic equation, suffice it to put\nthe Japanese kamikaze pilots on one side, and the flying bat bombs, which were\ndeveloped and activated during the same historical period, on the other, to\nrealize that both are objectified victims of the modern war industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}

            Reality and representation,\nhistorical truth and fiction are the raw materials used by Gueller to construct a sculptural mise en sc\u00e8ne that\nfloats in a new spatial and temporal composition. Her engagement with the gap\nand interrelations between historical documentation of a real action and a monument\nas an image of memory etched in the material, introduce the ways in which the\nculture of memory, its representation and perpetuation are constructed, on the\none hand, and the manner in which visual signifiers hidden from the public eye,\nincluding works of art (e.g. in the basements of museum collections), transform\nfrom a periodical document to a cenotaph, on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Homer, The Odyssey<\/em>,\nBook XXIV, in The Iliad and the Odyssey<\/em>, trans. Samuel Butler (Chicago:\nEncyclopedia Britannica, 1955), p. 317.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2.\nJohn Berger,\n<\/em>“Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking<\/em> (1980;\nNew York: Vintage, 1991), p. 13.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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