Dina
Shenhav

My work essentially deals with situations of aggressive conflicts. I am interested in examining the cruelty and brutality of man as opposed to the tenderness and humanity inherent in him. One of the issues I am working on is the relationship between forces of nature and man, man as a ruler and as ruled by such forces. I explore apocalyptic themes, and create works depicting devastation and destruction. I am interested in characters which are perceived as the embodiment of evil, and I am engaged in the struggle between the two forces: between what is defined as ‘good’ and what is defined as ‘bad’. These opposites exist, for example, in “D.O.A.” (2016), where I sculpted a cabin of a hunter who kills animals for pleasure or sport, and who decorates his cabin and surroundings with his taxidermized victims. In the cabin, I sculpted all of his belongings, his bed, shoes, food, and more. The viewer can feel empathy towards the person living in the cabin, and at the same time feel repulsion from and fear of the cruelty exhibited. This paradoxical conflict also exists in the materials, guns, knives, saws and other tools made of hard, sharp, painful, inconsiderate materials which is transformed into soft, surrendering, pleasant foam. I aim to illuminate the potential of things in a way that is not clearly foreseeable. In "Merkava" (2019), I made a tank the exact size and shape as the real Israeli Merkava tank, made again of foam. The tank gently breaks through the gallery wall and occupies almost the entire space. The viewer’s first impression is of a massive military machine of destruction, which then takes a turn and becomes something airy, harmless, and gentle, with the sense that it is almost as if a slight touch might cause it to collapse. Another material I use in my installations is coal, which I use to build surfaces of mountains and cities that are all made of black coal. In such works, I am fascinated by the contrast of having standing buildings, houses, and cities made out of the materials of ruins – coal. I am currently working on two series of paintings and two large-scale installations. In recent years, I began to integrate sound and video into my installations, and my goal for the coming years is to create large-scale installations that combine sound, video, and other materials, and to collaborate with other artists.