In 2019 Outset Israel supported artist Nivi Alroy’s exhibition Mariana Trench, curated by Aya Lurie, presented at The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art.
After the Great Flood of 2150, a figure recalling the American cartographer and researcher Marie Tharp sits in her study, hunched over the drawing table, and gazes at her long scrolls, on which she has drawn maps and diagrams of past periods in human art and culture. This is the last remaining spot on earth, which has been almost completely wiped out by glaciers that melted during the "Sixth Extinction.
The solo exhibition of the multidisciplinary artist Nivi Alroy began a moment after that extinction. It consisted of several site-specific installations depicting seductive and frightening visions of a future world re-emerging in the wake of global ecological destruction. Alroy’s work is based on actual scientific research in the fields of biology, oceanography, and ecology (which she became deeply acquainted with during an art residency program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), coupled with experiences and memories of her family. Although Alroy relies on real-world materials, she transforms them to create a fictional and poetic work in which scientific facts and predictions serve only as a starting point. The destruction of life on earth will occur, according to scientific predictions, as a result of ongoing and complex processes: atmospheric warming; flooding of the land by the seas and oceans due to melting glaciers; damage to natural resources and their aggressive exploitation; and irrevocable disruption of the ecological balance that has nourished and preserved a host of processes and organisms on earth for thousands of years – including ourselves, the human race. By mapping the past (that is, our present), Alroy’s sculptural installations portrayed the world after the calamity as an evolutionary hybrid made up of the remains of a destroyed civilisation.
The exhibition space served as an arena for performances, meetings, and collaborations with artists and researchers from the fields of dance, music and science. The upper gallery presented an audiovisual project that accompanied this exhibition, The Mariana Trench – Flooding, a radio play and screening, the product of Alroy’s collaboration with the artist and author Moran Shoub.
ON VIEW: 25th May - 24th August 2019
