A new two-artist exhibition featuring photography, painting, sculpture, and installation by two artists from the same kibbutz in the south of the country.

Ziva Yelin was born, raised, and lived as a member of Kibbutz Be’eri. Sophie Berzon Makay arrived at the kibbutz as a child from a large city—London—and has since lived within two very different worlds that she carries within her. Both of their lives are intertwined with the kibbutz landscape from within, and with the nature beyond the fence in the western Negev near Gaza—at times a green field with an endless horizon and the scent of harvest, and at other times burnt, blackened, and sorrowful land.

In the past, people from the outside referred to the kibbutz as a “nature reserve,” a term its members adopted with pride, describing a place that preserves its values, balances spiritual and material life, connects nature and culture, and serves as an example and a model.

Today, places like their kibbutz are in danger of becoming nature reserves that belong to the past. Be’eri is one of the few kibbutzim that has remained cooperative, where members work together, contribute to a shared fund, and receive equal living conditions. The decisive reason for this is its economic success, which enables it to provide living needs, education, security, and culture for all its members. Yet the revolutionary cooperative idea—rooted in the pursuit of social justice, in balancing material and spiritual life, and in mutual responsibility—has become a paradox, in which preserving it seems possible only for wealthy kibbutzim.

But this is not only an internal kibbutz discussion. The capitalist world, the privatization of state institutions, the rising cost of living, increasing housing prices, and the climate crisis push all of us in this country to search for new answers.

Each artist, in her own way, raises questions about nature and culture, and about the unusual cooperative-capitalist lifestyle in which they live. Through the kibbutz landscape, they ask: Is all of this still alive? Is it being kept alive artificially? What is still vibrant, and what has already become part of the past and faded away?

Are they living the dream, or are they confined within a “golden cage” before the kibbutz itself turns into a kind of nature reserve, like a zoo—where people come to see what no longer exists naturally, but has become an exhibit from another time?

In an era when plastic plants are sold at IKEA, lawns are covered with artificial grass, and entire hospitals are decorated with synthetic greenery, a hundred years after the creation of kibbutz nature, the question arises: how much of this story is still truly natural?

Currator text

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Closing: 25.6.22

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