Rami Atar - From the End of the World to its End
"At the moment when [...] remembers His children, who endure in misery amidst the nations of the world, He sheds two tears into the great sea, and its sound is heard from the end of the world to its end, and that is the earthquake."
Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 59a
A single space containing two spheres. One large, with a rusted base, nearly filling the entire space, and the other small, positioned beside it. The two spheres create a solid presence of raw material, a heavy and oppressive mass. Even the air between the iron bars does not ease the feeling of suffocation.
At the inception of this installation, somewhere around the attempted judicial overhaul, Rami Ater sought to express the sensation of standing on the edge, at the threshold of a dreadful chaos. The events of October 2023, the war that followed, the hostages, the victims, the national mourning and loss all led to a turning point in the work. "This is not the edge," he says painfully, "we are already deep within the chaos."
The two iron balls he created were made through a prolonged process of cutting and shaping, joining and smoothing, screwing and manual polishing. Their design is rough, and they lean as if ready to fall, threatening to break apart. If for a moment they seem like models of Earth and a planet attached to it, it soon becomes clear that this installation neither rotates on an axis nor simulates the motion of celestial bodies. Rami Ater’s spheres create a feeling of stagnation and deadlock, as if some inaudible sound is emanating from them.
What is this sound that moves from one end of the world to the other, spanning the entire globe? Is it a sound so powerful that the human ear cannot perceive it? Or perhaps it is the sound heard when the universe reacts to extraordinary events—ones exceptional in intensity or fundamental in meaning? Even if human ears are deaf to the voice of the universe, it is undoubtedly present, filling the installation and the surrounding air to the brim.
There is some comfort in the artist’s choice to draw straight lines of order on the spheres surfaces, in his decision to bury “gold” at the bottom of the smaller sphere or to add a touch of blue at its upper edge.
The dashed blue line, drawn on the room’s walls by Adi T. Hoffman, frames the space. It accentuates the sense of profound fracture while simultaneously raising the possibility that, a day will come and the broken line will be whole.

Curator: Daniella Shalev