In his new exhibition, Rami Ater presents a body of work that moves along the axis between the monumental memorial and the personal rupture embodied in the domestic space. Iron - the material most closely associated with Ater’s practice - undergoes, in his hands, a process of deconstruction. While in local culture these metals are linked to the ethos of commemoration, to outdoor sculpture, and to the structural frameworks of national memory, in Ater’s work they assume a different meaning. His impulse to create precisely from within a state of ongoing ruin is what redefines reality as transient. This is also the source of the word “provisional” in the exhibition’s title: it is a declaration of refusal to surrender to an endless cycle of destruction, and a turning of the gaze toward the act of creation itself as a source of vitality and hope.
Ater does not seek to produce objects of commemoration, but rather to engage in the symbolic dismantling of the concept of “ruin.” He examines what happens when material loses its role as protection and becomes a silent witness to human vulnerability. After the Holocaust, Amos Oz wrote: “One does not die from memory; one dies from forgetting.” The memorials that arose throughout Europe and Israel were intended to prevent such forgetting. Now, Oz’s sentence is being tested in real time, in the face of an erasure that comes from within, from those entrusted with preserving memory.
The entire installation is set within the space as a fragmented sequence of isolated fragments, some of them concealed. Moving between spaces of absence and material testimonies, visitors are invited to gather the pieces of ruin and attempt to mend them into a whole memory. This sense of fragmentation also resonates in the video work “The Nothingness,” which documents the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman. Ater’s camera follows visitors as they appear and disappear within the frame, until they seem like shadows of presence and absence inside the concrete labyrinth. Ater identifies the memorial as a space of disorientation and collective solitude, which he echoes in relation to the sense of loss and disappearance on October 7.
The work “Freedom” examines the heroic typological codes of Israeli public sculpture, returning to the familiar “raised gesture” known from the works of Nathan Rapoport and Naftali Bezem. Ater gives it a contemporary interpretation: the figure of the marcher raising a flag moves between protest and disintegration; the gesture that once symbolized sovereignty now becomes a question mark. Behind the flag-bearer trails a procession of gaunt metal figures, their bodies bearing traces of scars through acts of welding and melting. Other figures have undergone a process of subtraction and appear hollowed out, like skeletons of themselves. Ater’s technique - subtraction, removal, burning - serves the idea of absence, creating a kind of wound-space that is also an opening toward alternative forms of life.
The figures hold hands as an anchor of survival; within a space of rupture, they refuse to let go of one another. The procession ends with a figure turned backward - perhaps like Lot’s wife, or as a figure unwilling to part, perhaps a metaphor for a binding memory that holds the entire procession in its grip. Either way, this is a moment of hesitation: between forward and backward, between movement and memory.
The gaze toward public space is ultimately transferred to the wounded intimacy of the communities surrounding Gaza. “Children’s Houses” function as a microcosm of trauma: the rough treatment of the material, the cutting and scorching, transform the metal into a wounded “body.” It is a hollow, perforated, and scarred image of what is called a children’s house. Through an anti-heroic figurativeness that sculpts the remnant rather than the whole body, Ater confronts visitors with the current Israeli reality: the rupture that has formed in trust, in home, and in the national promise.
The exhibition seeks to dwell within this crack, and simply to acknowledge the ruin.


Curator: Michal Hasson Glazer