Outset Israel supported the production of the exhibition "Rethinking Broken Lines – A Tribute to Heda Oren" by Hilla Ben Ari, exhibited in Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art at 2017, curated by Tal Yahas.
In continuation of this production support, the video installation "Na'amah – A Tribute to Nahum Benari", 2015 (Video, Full HD, 14:17 min.) of the artist, was donated in the name of the artist and Outset Contemporary Art Fund to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art collection.
'Na'amah' combines a number of choreographic scenes into a complex narrative opus. The film is based on the play 'Tubal Cain' written by Nahum Benari, the artist's grandfather’s brother, who was an author and one of the founders of Kibbutz Ein Harod. The play is an interpretation of the biblical story of Tubal-Cain, the "father of metalsmiths", through which the author confronts issues of community, creative powers, hubris, sin, guilt and punishment. One of the characters in the play is Tubal-Cain’s sister, Naamah, a mute gleaner. Hilla Ben Ari makes the character of Naamah a central key to her work’s meaning, and seeks to read the play through a gender prism and to expand the critical perspectives implicit in it.
The scenes that she builds are composed of sequences of charged physical states – of groups and of individuals – that range between strength, weakness and collapse. She conducts a dialogue with the structure of the stage from the early days of the kibbutz and also with the Greek theater. As in all her works, the relations between body and the skeleton of the construction carry in-depth meanings, and the trembling of the strained body echoes the component of time and space that is threatened by regimentation.
