HaCubia Gallery: In Their Image

Maya Zehavi, Mor Peled
Curator: Maya Israel

The exhibition "In Their Image" presents the fruits of visual research conducted by artists Maya Zahavi and Mor Peled. The new artworks oscillate between 2D and 3D, between the digital realm of pixels, vectors, and screens, and the material world. As the artists explore these transitions and their implications, they try to extract aesthetic value from various disruptions—flattening, deconstruction, the loss of information, or unexpected additions—and from what remains after these disruptions occur. In doing so, they create a parallel universe—a false universe where groundbreaking archaeological findings are uncovered at the Monastery of the Cross: the remnants of a mosaic, letters, and artifacts hidden deep underground, found in a tunnel discovered by chance. Inspired by the empty space and the discoveries made there, the two artists weave new and deceptive stories, including one love story, which they associate with "The Knight in the Panther's Skin," an epic poem by 12th-century Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli, who lived in the monastery and composed his seminal piece there. To the artists, the 800 years that separate then from now are a gaping space that stretches between the realms of poetics, reality, and truth—a space they can fill with their imaginings, embodied in physical materials.