| The core of my current body of works is dealing with middle stages, focusing on a critical, compressed moment. Through the mediums of sculpture, installation, drawing and collage, I investigate aspects of banal evil, bureaucratic violence, and alienation that exist underneath the surface and threaten to emerge. In my “laboratory,” I use nature as a tool to tell a story. I always disrupt it and implant bugs in it by confronting it with the artificial. I often create hybrids that combine organic language and materials with synthetic ones. I examine the overlapping of biological and synthetic elements and attempt to come up with the chemical formula for combining them. Thus, I seek to undermine prevalent dichotomies, such as nature and culture, good and bad, male and female, life and death. |  |
Tomer Sapir
The core of my current body of works is dealing with middle stages, focusing on a critical, compressed moment. Through the mediums of sculpture, installation, drawing and collage, I investigate aspects of banal evil, bureaucratic violence, and alienation that exist underneath the surface and threaten to emerge.
In my “laboratory,” I use nature as a tool to tell a story. I always disrupt it and implant bugs in it by confronting it with the artificial. I often create hybrids that combine organic language and materials with synthetic ones. I examine the overlapping of biological and synthetic elements and attempt to come up with the chemical formula for combining them. Thus, I seek to undermine prevalent dichotomies, such as nature and culture, good and bad, male and female, life and death. I search to create a world that exists in a twilight zone between fiction and reality, and where the border between a joke and a catastrophe is ambiguous.
The work Research for the Full Crypto-Taxidermical Index (2010) is shown in the exhibition Shelf Life, curated by Tami Katz-Freiman and Rotem Ruff, in the Haifa Museum of Art. The sculpture was produced in collaboration with the Haifa Museum of Art on the occasion of the exhibition. The work is a system of vitrines that contain a collection of objects. Some of them were gathered from nature, and some are sculptures that imitate fictional organic configurations. The collection is carefully organized in the display, but with no classificatory principle, and the border between the organic and the artificial is ambiguous. The whole system holds in store a tension between present and past. While some of the “findings” look as if they were taken from a prehistoric time, it seems that others contain organic values from the present such as mold. The tension gets intense in the objects that are fossilized and rotten at the same time.
