HERE BE DRAGONS

A new exhibition at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History by artist Nevet Yitzhak.

In recent weeks, a new exhibition by artist Nevet Yitzhak was opened at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. The exhibition was set up during September, and due to the security situation, there was no official opening for the exhibition. Today, it is displayed in the gallery for contemporary art exhibitions at the museum.
The exhibition is a result of an artistic research project conducted by Yitzhak in the museum’s collections over the last two years and expresses the research and conservation work done in the museum’s collections and their implications on the relationship between humans and nature.

The work process included a long comprehensive research about the collection and meetings with researchers and collection curators at the museum. The exhibition includes three main installations, combining video, sound, and items from the museum’s collections. With these three installations, Yitzhak created a kind of alternative museum within the natural history museum, a museum where ‘facts’ about nature (taxidermy and other items from the museum’s collections) are displayed alongside complete fiction. During this, the artist points out the museum’s display methods and mechanism and invites visitors to rethink how we learn and research nature, the knowledge collected about it, and the hidden story in this process.

The name of the exhibition, ‘HERE BE DRAGONS,’ is an English translation of the Latin inscription ‘HIC SVNT DRAGONS.’ Until the medieval period, cartographers used this inscription to mark on a map a land that had not yet been explored. With this inscription, the boundaries of the world known to the West were marked, the edges of knowledge, and hence the beginning of the unknown.

Curator: Dr. Liora Belford.