The Story of Y, Chapter II

In and around us blossoms, stems, leaves and boughs grow into an organic landscape. The weave of our veins continues to trace itself in the fine lines of foliage. We breathe into each other down to the fertile soil of our roots. Where we cease to think in the subsoil of our existence, in the decomposition of our molecules, our cellular tissue mixes with earth and water. We outgrow each other mirroring in all directions. Above and below, inside and outside differ only in the interplay of the different lines of sight; through their openings we are all at the same time in the same place. We have entered the second chapter of The Story of Y, an installation work by Israeli artist Eitan Ben-Moshe, whose first iteration was shown at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2020. The title of the exhibition refers to Pauline Réage’s infamous erotic novel, Story of O by, which follows a woman's path to freedom through total submission. As ambiguous as the letter ‘Y’ – split, questioning, and gender-defining – the Story of O poses the question of who controls whom in the dynamic of sexual submission, and of the complicated relationship between freedom, abuse, dominance and surrender. In The Story of Y, Ben-Moshe expands the equation to include the variables of mankind, nature and technology. Oscillating between dystopian surrealism and harmonic universalism, the multilayered works continue to spin the precarious threads of the Conditio Humana in dreamlike sequences: Above an abstract miniature cosmos made of glass, human sexual organs combine with those of plants, forming wall reliefs collaged by means of digital and analogue techniques. The centrepiece of the installation is the CGI video piece Shaki, Shaki (2021). The video is part of a larger series of works for which the artist collected folk songs from around the world, recomposing them into new hymns for a future humanity. Eitan Ben-Moshe was born in Haifa, 1971, and lives and works in Tel-Aviv and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally in institutions and galleries such as the Herzliya museum (Tel Aviv), Dittrich & Schlechtriem (Berlin), Zuzeum Art Centre (Riga), Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen Museum (Amsterdam), Magasin III, Museum for Contemporary Art (Stockholm) and Alon Sergev Gallery (Tel Aviv) among others. He teaches at the Department of Fine Arts, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and at Shenkar Collage, Ramat-Gan.