With the USA’s recent withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement signed by 174 countries in an effort to curb global warming according to UN policies on climate change, it has become more critical than ever to discuss the charged and tangled relationships between mankind and nature since the dawn of times.
Homo sapiens has been in existence for several millions of years, yet the tipping point in this relationship dates only several centuries back. Fully dependent on nature for their survival, primitive cultures had always lived in awe of nature and its spirits, worshiping them in the hope of living in harmony with nature. Yet man’s awe and subservience diminished with the technical progress of civilizations, which allowing them to widen their grip on nature and its resources. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the same mindset that sought to liberate man from its dependency on nature by exerting control over it, had also resulted in growing control over society itself and its individuals. Moreover, today we witness the detrimental impact that we, as humans, have over the planet, as a cycle of over-exploitation, pollution and industrialization results in extreme weather conditions and natural catastrophes.
Breaking Balance brings together a selection of works by Israeli artists who address this perennial clash between nature and culture as has evolved throughout the millennia of human civilization. With an approach going from the critical to the lyrical and whimsical, they address this ongoing tension across its repercussions in nature and the human mindset and activities that, motivated by financial gains and technological progress, lead to irreversible environmental damage.
The works look at the many strategies of subordination, domestication and exploitation with regard to nature and its resources through a range of positions: from the elegiac tone of Tal Frank’s Tie Break: Third Set, which stages a miniature wood from a collection of scorched baseball bats, to the tongue-in-cheek video by Hadar Mitz, Hold the Sun, where a glamour girl stands on a beach, effortlessly exerting her power over the setting sun in a parody of man’s domineering attitude toward to nature.
Gallery Hit is supported using public funding by Slovak Art Council
