I had started to create the pieces of the series On the Face of the Deep during the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the climate crisis, providing a perspective of existential horror.

I continued working on this series during the current war. We have experienced the collapse of the narrative of our lives and a sense of the shattered, fragmented and crumbling reality. We were exposed to something horrific, an existential threat, and the shattering of the sequence of life, the sense of self and the world that we could not articulate in a discourse that holds reality.

For the works of this series, I utilize photographic imagery shot by me overlaid with charcoal drawings. A body of work drawings of water and sky without any sign of cultivated land or human culture evoking associations of an apocalyptic reality.

Still, even in our times, humanity lives under the threat of wars and annihilation.

The dominant black color in these works, along with flashes of light, points to another place, another time. Darkness and gloom express the existential anxiety, fundamentally rooted in the understanding that our existence is only temporary. Darkness over the abyss of our current existence. The drawings "On the Face of the Deep" series evoke associations of genesis and apocalypse, the creation of the world and the Flood. In this Flood there is no dove bringing good tidings, only black birds crashing in the darkness.

The black birds express a feeling of destruction and an unexplained threat coming from another world. They are like threatening angels of death, similar to the violent birds in Hitchcock's film or the demonic raven in Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven."

Despite the atmosphere of threat, the image of the "abyss" also points to the possibility of hope. In the Creation of the World story in the book of Genesis, the abyss is the source of the universe and life. One can see that the sketches of the crashing birds also resemble primordial water creatures.

Through the technique of charcoal sketches on photographs, a tension emerges between the seascapes and skies that, preserved by photography, remain resistant to time, contrasting with the fragility and processes of change depicted in the bird imagery. Photography, as a medium for creating the background in these works, which is not subject to destructive processes, according to Walter Benjamin, is stable, remains intact, and can be mechanically reproduced and replicated. The reproducibility underscores the unique qualities of the drawing technique, which is a singular, fragile expression rooted in the fleeting and ever-changing reality.

Avivia Raz

The sketches will be displayed in a space where sounds generated by a black hole, recorded by NASA, will be played.

“The Chandra sonifications were led by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), with input from NASA's Universe of Learning. The sustained collaboration was driven by visualization scientist Dr. Kimberly Arcand (CXC), astrophysicist Dr. Matt Russo and musician Andrew Santaguida (both of the SYSTEM Sounds project).