Uri Zamir creates atmospheric stagings that are as familiar as they are irritating and blur the boundaries between reality and imagination – an approach that is strongly influenced by his background in theater. For his exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, he has developed a new series of works in which he combines pieces of furniture made of dark, heavy wood – cabinets, chests of drawers and clock cases – with finely crafted reliefs. This furniture not only supports the pictures, it also plays a key role in shaping their perception. Unlike classic frames, they place the reliefs in a private, homely context: they look like heirlooms, familiar everyday objects and status symbols at the same time.
The reliefs show scenes that initially appear familiar, but are subtly and humorously refracted: Instead of idealized, childlike baroque angels, we encounter corpulent, older male figures. Their awkward grace and carnal presence create a disarming mixture of awe and absurdity.
These angels have not been sent out – they have not descended from heaven to bring messages or salvation. They have simply remained. These figures resemble the faint echo of a myth that the world no longer needs – and yet it is there: persistent, alive, present. Not a tragic demise, but a quiet lingering in the space between. This aged fantasy reveals beauty, absurdity and tender vulnerability. The angels embody an almost explicit political inertia – as if their mere non-action, their non-rescue, their non-rising becomes a silent protest against the ethos of productivity, success and heroism. They do not resist, but neither do they submit.
When images are no longer in their prime, but persist beyond that, when they linger in a world that no longer needs them, they begin to age. They lose their aura, the fantasy itself becomes soft and tired. The images are tired of the ideal they were meant to carry, exhausted by the task of embodying the sublime. It is an exhaustion that arises from a symbolic system of order that has lost its validity and now simply wants to exist – without elevating, leading or promising.
Uri Zamir’s works not only undermine the power of traditional imagery, they also make its fragility visible. His angels stand for the afterlife of the image – for a symbolic order that has become tired but continues to exist. By replacing the figure of the angel – traditionally a symbol of purity, protection and salvation – with tangible, ageing male bodies, Zamir exposes the fragility of heroic and authoritarian ideals. These figures reject the logic of efficiency, leadership and male strength. In their unwavering presence lies a quiet, persistent resistance – not a combative gesture, but a quiet plea for the right to loss of meaning, ambivalence and continued existence beyond glory and the pressure of productivity. An image that no longer elevates, no longer redeems, but is nevertheless there – exhausted, disarming and radically present.
These themes are also reflected in his video performance Crater’s Belly, which oscillates between myth, ritual and speculative fiction. At the center is a shaman-like figure – a hybrid figure between human, mutation and memory – whose mere presence seems to dissolve time. A long, overtone-rich sound emanates from his body, a meditative frequency that runs through space, landscape and time. The shaman wanders seemingly aimlessly through a crater-like landscape, at once archaic and extraterrestrial, as if it were bound neither to place nor time. In this environment, he encounters a group of people who surrender to this sound – their bodies begin to react to the vibrations, as if an archaic form of communication is unfolding within them. A wordless connection develops between them, a moment of collective receptivity.
The video performance dispenses with narrative clarity and instead invites a sensual, open perception. Sound is not understood here as information, but as an experience – as an impulse that permeates the body, changes atmospheres and triggers inner movements. With slow camera angles and intense close-ups, the work develops a meditative visual language that operates beyond fixed meanings. The shamanic figure remains deliberately enigmatic – neither healer nor prophet, neither human nor myth. Perhaps it is a fragment from another time, an echo of a future or a symbol of a state of transition.
The openness of Crater’s Belly refuses a fixed localization – geographically as well as ideologically – and thus invites us to engage with resonance, irritation and uncertainty. This creates a space of possibility for encounters that goes beyond language and eludes quick access.
Uri Zamir’s works create sensual spaces of experience in which the familiar is simultaneously broken and renegotiated. They are places of ambivalence and silent presence, where firmly established meanings are shaken and dissolve. By disempowering historical symbols and focusing on sound as a physical experience, Zamir opens up a stage for intermediate states – between productivity and exhaustion, myth and present, image and sound. These spaces are neither clearly defined nor fully graspable, but remain open to resonance, irritation and poetic imagination. In their calm resistance to quick interpretations and usability, Uri Zamir’s works open up a poetic in-between space that invites us to linger, reflect and reinvent.
