An installation comprised of three works on huge fabric sheets (each about 6 m high) form the core of the exhibition “And then the silence” by Ruthi Helbitz Cohen. The installation creates a capsule of space within a space; elliptical mirrors placed on the floor simultaneously reflect the artworks and the viewer.
Curator Dr. Smadar Sheffi wrote about the work: “Ruthi Helbitz Cohen’s works focus on issues of femininity, gender, equality, and cultural structures of women’s images. Her figures are based on primordial sources - mythologies and stories – and on their various incarnations in art and popular culture, such as Walt Disney films. Helbitz Cohen’s intensive artworks narrate stories, nightmares, dreams, and legends – at times painfully. These images are seemingly vocal, as if reciting poetry, screaming, and murmuring utterances, acting as independent entities seeking their pathway through the world.”

For the first time, Helbitz Cohen is exhibiting a staged photograph: Tomer Sapir, artist and friend, is seen in the photographs enveloped in a paper dress that is exhibited in the Hourglass, part of the installation. The dress, made of painted cutouts of body parts, is delicate yet terrifying. The paper dress encases Sapir like a cocoon encasing a chrysalis which becomes a butterfly. The interface between the male body and Helbitz Cohen’s paper dresses raises issues of gender and power.

A new piece, “Radiant Beauty,” will be exhibited in the Open House in Ramle concurrently with the exhibition at the CACR. The curtain of paper tears, made in workshops initiated by the CACR with the Open House, was made in a collective process in workshops led by Helbitz Cohen with women from diverse communities in Ramle. Participants wrote their thoughts, questions, and short stories on the tears.

Helbitz Cohen’s engagement with the feminine, its mythical aspects and various expressions, addresses upon concrete life issues.