In this poetic video work, filmed against the backdrop of the botanical garden and The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University, Meirav Heiman and Ayelet Carmi create a world suffused with beauty yet resonant with anxiety, which alludes to local history and mythology.
Treading the line between reality and imagination, past and future, two artist-scientists set out to study their natural surroundings, donning paper cutout outfits composed of plant and insect imagery. The artificial vegetation enveloping their bodies is fragile and seductive, while simultaneously threatening to overtake them. They seem to be swallowed up by nature, so that they themselves become “natural objects,” merging with the surrounding artifacts to the point of being transformed from observing subjects into the objects of our gaze.
A similarly absurd atmosphere and inverted perspective on nature are represented in two poems, by Robert Frost and Joyce Kilmer, recited by the artist Etty Ben-Zaken in a musical collaboration with the Modalius Ensemble and the composer Yuval Shay-El.
The work is dedicated to Maria Sibylla Merian, a groundbreaking entomologist, naturalist and scientific illustrator active in the 17th century, as well as to Ruth Koppel and Bracha Avigad, two local illustrators of natural and botanical imagery.
