When Will the Bells Toll?

Avner Singer and Mohammad Abu Rukayya

Curator: Anat Lideror

Eternity, temporality, timelessness, humanity, measurement, and the human perception of time constitute the field of inquiry here.

These are times in which nature no longer determines the rhythm of time and its cycles; it exists in and of itself, most of the time disconnected from us. We, meanwhile, have put on lenses that separate time from nature, as well as additional lenses – those of nationality and religion, gender and tradition – all human constructs.

The exhibition raises questions about the human forces that drive humanity and about the path it has chosen to follow.

It evokes a longing for a time that existed fully in the pre-human world or at the dawn of humanity – natural time. A time that was not enslaved to progress; a time of seasons and cycles, a time of patience. A time in which nature sustained humanity for tens of thousands of years, providing food and shelter, sources of water, and the conditions for development.

Yet humanity chose the principle of control: control over nature, over time and its organization, and over one another – people controlling people. The sense of having no time that characterizes our lives today – fast, overloaded, almost nonexistent time – is disconnected from the earth. It is filled with concepts of time that have deviated from a healthier rhythm: screen time; time divided into Jewish and Muslim, Christian and Buddhist time; the clock and measured hours; and the loss of a subjective, qualitative sense of time.

Mohammad Abu Rukayya and Avner Singer, artists who work with material, have been walking side by side along this path for more than twenty years. For the first time, they come together in a joint exhibition in which they seek to lift their gaze from within the material and, through it, ask whether the full meaning of time also implies the existence of an eternal, spiritual realm beyond it.

Does this realm belong entirely to religion? What is the place of secular spirituality among us? What place is there for a spirituality that transcends definitions of religion, and even of secularism? Why is our gaze so close to the ground? Have we forgotten our spiritual stature? Is this connected to the feeling that harmony and spirit are slipping away from us?

The desire to change the rules of the game – even joyfully, in vivid colors – to refresh our automatic systems and challenge existing perceptions of time, is expressed through new possibilities for time: different intervals, a subjective perception of it, and a return to sounding time itself; time connected to sound, to its depth, breadth, and fullness.

The bell and the prayer wheels, eternity, silence and sound, come from another realm – a higher, spiritual world; harmonious and outside time. A place that unites all that is human, and what lies beyond it, into a single whole.

Mohammad and Avner present geometries, forms, and spaces of possibility: possibilities for connecting earth and sky, for connecting perceptions of beauty and the movement of the spirit with time – and perhaps with eternity as well.

In one of his three works, Avner Singer presents a work concerned with cycles of time. It emerged from experiments with a “work in 24 hours,” a timeframe that challenges the properties of the material. The results of successive cycles of experimentation embody within them a perception of the material's own time and its resistance.

Mohammad Abu Rukayya has long created bells. For him, form, sound, and space express the right encounter. They also express his silence; his difficulty in speaking. Silence may thunder in verbal language, yet in the language of artistic creation it becomes rich, harmonious, and fluid – a truly poetic language.

Both artists attend closely to the surfaces of their works, to prints and textures, pausing to observe traces of cracks, fissures, and peeling. They wonder and attempt to understand yet another layer in the relationship between the human being, material, and that immense and elusive essence: time.

When Will the Bells Ring? A call for profound awakening.

Anat Lideror, Exhibition Curator

Curatorial Text