Artists: Roy Cohen, Daniel Kep, Yaron Attar, Ana Wild, Lihi Nidiz, Uri Weinstein, ron asulin, Regev Amrani, Lee Nevo, Ido Gordon, Itamar stamler, Jonathan Ron
The exhibition Evil Root delves into the dark side of human nature, with its unbridled impulses and instincts and the malevolence animating in it. It points to the unbearable, at times arbitrary lightness with which moral deterioration occurs and ethical boundaries are crossed.
Evil has many faces. It is not only one arm of a binary opposition, which stands in direct relation to goodness and raises momentous ethical questions. Whether intentional or resulting from a loss of control, evil is evil is evil. It is present in our lives in different ways and involves ignorance, manipulation, lies, exploitation, bullying, subjugation, as well as physical and mental harm.
The source of human evil has occupied thinkers and scholars in diverse disciplines from time immemorial, presenting many questions, including whether evil is innate to human nature, as maintained by Nachmanides in his exegesis of Genesis 8:21: “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, regarded man as a “noble savage” who is innately good at birth, and held that it is civilization and the environment that corrupt him, while Freud argued that human beings are born with a set of instincts and impulses, and as a social creatures they must learn to control them by means of acquired laws and rules of conduct.
Alongside the desire to shed light on personal and collective responsibility, the featured works also touch on various aspects of human evil, and on instances of injustice and infliction of pain and suffering through physical or verbal violence. Without judgment, they indicate the immanent presence of evil in every society and in every person, and to behavioral patterns that fix and even normalize it within social, cultural, and political structures.
Works from recent years are enmeshed with site-specific works created especially for the exhibition. They address murder in the family, class racism, the subjugation of women and misogyny, hierarchies of domination in gay sex clubs, the exploitation of animals for financial gain, evidence attesting to acts of violence from Israeli court protocols, etc.—issues that represent only an inkling of the malice that prevails around us.
The thoughts and work on the exhibition Evil Root began over a year ago, before the October 7 events. Despite the complexity and the difficulty in dealing with this subject in light of the harsh, tragic events we experienced, we chose to hold the exhibition and direct our gaze at the evil, which was present in our lives before, and will sadly be present in the future as well.
