Summoning The Wild
Galia Offri
Curator: Dr. Revital Michali
06.07.23-11.08.23
Summoning The Wild
Galia Offri draws, in markers on pergament paper, scenes that present court hearings in murder trials. Her objective is not to document how the proceedings unfold (like courtroom sketches) and she is not physically present in the court. Offri views photographed materials that document those who have been indicted for murder (including serial killers), who have been recorded by the security cameras in interrogation rooms (black and white video films), or in filmed documentation of murder trials broadcast on the network Court TV (an American TV network that covers criminal trials). From the documentation, Offri choses to draw the heated moments in which the cultural barrier is burst, and violence breaks out in the sterile space: the moment when the victim’s father taunts the accused as the sentence is given, or the moment when the accused becomes enraged and tries to attack the judge, the audience or themselves.
In the exhibition Summoning the Wild, drawings of animals are juxtaposed beside, above and below the drawings of scenes of courtroom disturbances. These animal drawings were born out of Offri’s observation of photographs from nature and science books, as well as encyclopedias from the seventies that depict practices humans conduct on animals: experiments, captivity and hunting. Among the animal drawings are also those depicting power relations in nature, as expressed in the food chain.
The drawings in the exhibition are presented as a pile/stock, one on top of the other, in a way that creates a horizontal image – a kind of graph that encompasses the gallery’s walls. The pergament paper’s transparency enables a multi-layered exposure of the various images drawn on them. Thus, for example, an image of a bird devouring a fish mingles with a quarrel that ignites in the courtroom space. The images cumulate one on top of the other, without any hierarchy, in a way that generates a uniform web of culture and nature, law and savagery. The strength of the images does not lie in their ability to represent a specific scene, but rather in their accumulation, which is experienced as a mass of material and color, a seismographic diagram that documents changing forces of noise and pain.
The link between the world of the court and law, and the world of zoology, is no coincidence. Both in the legal system as well as in expanses of nature supervised by humanity, there is an attempt to train, domesticize and do away with passions, desires and feelings, all in the name of culture. From Offri’s perspective, and through this body of work, she points out that the endeavor to accord sterility to culture, and to domesticize nature, is doomed to fail. In Offri’s drawings the legal and zoological discourses merge: Images of court mayhem expose our savage nature as a society, a nature that cannot really be restrained. Images of domesticized nature expose the violence inherent in the attempt to constrain and train the wild. This is an endeavor that testifies to our manipulative dimension as a society that defines itself as cultured.
About the artist
Galia Offri (b. 1978, Nahariya) is a painter, a graduate of the Bezalel Department of Fine Arts, drawing studies at Parsons, New York, and Visual Arts at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. Her works have been shown in exhibitions, festivals and conferences in Israel and around the world, including: the Hendershot Gallery in New York, the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, Goldsmith’s University of London, the Israeli Center for Visual Art, and PechaKucha Israel. Her works have been published in newspapers such as the New York Times and Haaretz, as well as in magazines such as ArtReview. In 2016, Offri had a solo exhibition titled Sickness Leave at the Tel Aviv Artists’ Studios, within which she published an artist’s book with the support of the Rabinovich Foundation.
About the curator
Dr. Revital Michali, researcher, independent art curator, teacher and performance artist, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Michali holds a doctorate in Visual Art from Tel Aviv University. Her writing and art focus on female identity, motherhood and her connection to the public space. Michali has curated and produced exhibitions and art events in Tel Aviv, Berlin and the United States, including solo and group exhibitions at the ID Festival and Bethanien Künstlerhaus in Berlin, Providence College Galleries in Providence and Alfred Gallery. She has also curated performance night events and festivals at the galleries Kav 16, Alfred in Tel Aviv and Circle 1 in Berlin. She has written and produced artist books and collectors’ catalogs.