Ecological Art Exhibition by Artist Shai Zakai

Some 120 boxes of leaves, seeds, texts and photographs will be installed in one of the halls at Watec exhibition next Oct.

An ambitious project by Shai Zakai, a world known ecological artist and an environmental leader, who is also the founder & director of the 'Israeli Forum for Ecological Art', an Israeli NGO, established in 1999.

About theProject
Forest Tunes – The Library – a project in process, begun in 1995 and still ongoing, has to do with delighting the processes set in motion by human beings every day, for the most part hidden, related to the most burning ecological issues in the world, such as global warming, the loss of biodiversity and the deforestation. The project aims, among other things, to give a ‘face’ to natural entities referred to as the Genius Loci (sense of place).


Shai Zakai will build a sort of a refuge, for international and local visitors, to reflect upon environmental human daily actions during the Watec exhibition. More details can be found in - http://www.eco-art.co.il/projects.asp?CL=ENG

About the Exhibition
The exhibition makes use of several media – photography, video-art, installations, text, sound. For three days, the space will be transformed into a black box containing seeds and leaves, an installation of about 120 black boxes from all over the world, and texts collected by the artist, over a period of about nine years – the Library.

The ‘Genius Loci' – video-art 4.5 minutes long, serves as the “sound track” of the exhibition and attempts to awaken us to natural entities that are neither human nor trees but rather the essence of the place. (Much has been written about this in environmental studies, but never has its character been spelled out.) We have become blind to those entities. However, they stillexist.

The Library is constructed as though of four geological layers: a layer of man-inflicted environmental damages, a layer of local/global insights, a personal/global diaryand the Nari, simple magic. The Library includes scientific, artistic & environmental disciplines; through it one can experience the growing dissonance between man and place, and become acquainted with aspects of the global and the local culture of the twenty-first century.

The public areinvited to bring fallen leaves to the site, from places that have significance for them (with written explanations), to “leaf through” 'books' from Provence, Korea, Japan, Australia, Cyprus, France, Turkey, the Valley of the Goddess in Israel, and more, to read the texts planted inside each box, and to ponder on the species that we are destroying unthinkingly all the time, and that take place before our very eyes. The Library is, at one and the same time, a personal and collective diary of events, a documentation of environmental damage, a lack of environmental awareness, and a mapping of species/aesthetic values to be preserved. The leaves deposited in the Library function as relics; they are markers of the nature that was and the connection that was. Nature inboxes.

The visitors are given a copy of the inventory and may choose whether to carry out random meetings with leaves & texts, or else to focus their choices on particular boxes selected from the inventory.

The Library is connected metaphorically by the Dewey System to art libraries throughout the world. The texts are written in such a way as to combine documentation, scientific data, and poetic observation.

About the artist
Shai Zakai, a photographer and ecological artist, author of the book Faces and Facets (Portrait of a Woman) and the project “Concrete Creek 1999-2002” – in which reclamation of a stream functions as an artistic creation. She is the director/ founder of the “Israeli Forum for Ecological Art,” and holds an M.A. degree in Art and Environmental Policy. She has displayed more than fifty exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and throughout the world. Her works are to befound in both private and museum collections. She has represented Israel in the Art Biennale in Korea and in art and environment exhibitions and symposia in Africa, Japan, Italy, China, the United States, and more. She is a guest lecturer and curator in the field of ecological art.

Further details maybe found in her website - www.eco-art.co.il.

From the text of Professor Zuckermann, Tel Aviv University, about the Exhibition

“…Shai Zakai is the Israeli artist par excellence whose creative oeuvre in recent years has been devoted almost entirely to wrestling with the history of this complex and problematic relationship between nature and civilization, a relationship that has developed during the last few decades into a worldwide critical discoursea bout what is referred to as “the severe ecological problem” (some call it the “ecological Holocaust”) now confronting human civilization…Shai Zakai intervenesin nature in order to rescue from it what has been afflicted by alien intervention…”

List of work on theshow, technical details
- 4 wooden installations of shelves and supporting beams coming to sharp points at the top.
- 120 boxes containing leaves from the world + printed inventory
- Video-art – “Genius Loci” - 4.5 minutes loop
- Artist’s notebook – 10 prints on waste paper - 24 X 30 cm.

Below is an exampleof texts from inside the boxes in “Forest Tunes – TheLibrary”.

"770.56 Israel/ Observations + Diary/April 2003, December 2004/DeadSea/Wanderings

We go to set up a tent beside the salty and the sweet. Crystals are caught up in tree trunks, and I take photos of transient structures of salt. I change form, becoming the air between the crystals, play with the stalactites, taste them. The Dead Sea is disappearing. Must taste before we forget, or before they mix it together with the Red Sea, or before the temperature changes.

A year after, I return and sit beside the sweet spring, so very close to the salty, as if the place hadn’t decided what would be their meeting spot. Holding a small piece of salty tree trunk in the palm of my hand.

I volunteered to meditate somewhere along the central axis of energy in Israel on December 24, and I chose the salty station. Shmuel asks us to write what we felt when at the same time, that same moment, into the same axis were channeled all the intentions for healing heaven and earth.
Einstein, facing teachers at an educational conference, said: “A problem will never be solved by the consciousness that created it.” I want to create a new possibility.

I lose the sense of time. I’m a meeting of winds, an hour in a minute, inhale and am inhaled. I connect the disappearing sea with the Jordan and sail toward the mysterious crown, melt natural borders and the four points [wind directions]. I tunnel under the salty, am swept, and scorched to the Jordanian border, show there ingraphs, without words, when the sea will disappear for them. Return with eyes closed, not to see what we have already wrought...”

"770.59 Israel/Personal-Global Diary/1998/After the lecture in the communal dining room of Kibbutz Shuval/The Coral Bean Tree

And when they all left and I went outside to the glorious coral bean tree (erythrina), and I knewthat the lecture had been good, I wanted to mark it in some way, I could have asked for the compliments in writing, but I preferred to gather up the fiery flowers from the ground at the foot of the tree and remember via its fireman’s cap flowers. From the flowering I could know that it had happened in the spring; from the type of lecture, which it had been quite awhile ago; from the path to the car, that I had remained alone; from the amount I had gathered from the ground, that I had enough time.

A work of art, said André Breton, has value only to the extent that hints of the future seep into it. The act of gathering from one spot enables preservation, enables remembrance, enables texture and composition, enables future events like those that have already occurred; makes possible the concept of perpetuating the leaves in box 59...”