Homer Golem

Installation and Video,The Midrasha Art, Beit Berl

Curators: Lihi Chen, Rami Maymon

2013

Gnosis is an alchemist of a future era: a fictional figure who grows living beings in her laboratory using bacterial cellulose cultivated from kombucha cultures. She raises these organisms as if they were biological prototypes, then she preserves the skins and transforms them into sculptural bodies and prosthetic-like objects. In her world, bacterial cellulose becomes a new kind of skin—material that can be grown, harvested, and repurposed. Table legs are covered with the skin of these “golems,” blurring the boundaries between organism, body, prosthesis, and sculpture.

The video Golem Material is presented within a living, functioning installation that recreates Gnosis’s laboratory-factory. Large vessels contain growing bacterial cellulose cultures, each marked with the instruction “Grow Your Own Skin.” Incubators and display cases contain developing sculptural forms: table legs covered in bacterial skin and antlers grown from mycelium. A skinned lamb stands at the center of the installation, its exposed ribs slowly moving as if breathing. Sensors embedded in its body are activated by touch: when visitors stroke the lamb, large vessels of tea and microbial cultures come alive.

The installation extends into a strange ecosystem of laboratory, factory, and exhibition space. An electric hot plate continuously heats and evaporates tea; magnifying glasses rotate, intermittently revealing artworks by Picasso; and a lambskin embedded with crystals becomes another site of material transformation. Together, these elements construct a speculative production system in which organisms are cultivated as raw material, skins become prostheses, and the distinction between living matter and art object is constantly unsettled.