MORAN KLIGER

Seven Primates 2018

Basis Gallery

March 16th - May 19th Herzliya, Israel

In her solo exhibition “Seven Primates” at Basis Gallery, artist Moran Kliger presented large scale, labor-intensive pencil on paper figurative drawings. the works demonstrated how the border between man and beast blurs and dissolves, and the image itself becomes a new hybrid creature. In this twilight zone of the human and the animalistic, man has not yet lost completely his animalistic origin and the beast is heartrendingly “human.”

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The exhibition offered the viewer an encounter with a world that initially evokes a sense of estrangement, but on second gaze appears rather familiar and elicits identification and empathy. The 1.5 man-size ape drawings was installed in vitrines, which echo zoo cages and nature museums’ display cabinets. Thus, a kind of physical contact is created between the viewer, who walks among them, and the works. The drawings’ large size brings forth a chaotic feeling that undermines conventional perceptions of identities and hierarchies and at the time inspires a feeling of awe similar to that of religious experience. The viewer is unable to completely make out who is the subject he or she sees, where did it come from and what is its habitat, but can still identify him/herself in it. Human elements such as the gaze, the hands and the body postures produce a feeling of an unfamiliar world, which nevertheless is disturbingly similar to our own world.

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The primate drawings appeared as images uprooted from their natural surroundings and inserted into situations referencing familiar scenes from the Old and New Testament, scenes etched, directly or indirectly, in the viewer’s archetypal cultural memory. This move generates a reversal of the social-cultural order by depreciating or shifting attention from the “high” to the “low, from the spiritual to the secular, from the cultural to the savage.

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