“Sun Stand Still,” a site-specific installation by Gal Weinstein, is an exploration of the human desire to stop time. Reflecting a fascination with actual and potential forms of creation and destruction, progress and devastation, this project critically engages with the mythological and Romantic images embedded in Israel’s collective memory.

The installation’s title refers to the biblical miracle performed by the ancient Israelite leader Joshua Bin-Nun, who sought to win his battle against the kings of Canaan before darkness fell. By commanding the sun to stop in its course, Bin-Nun attempted to arrest the passage of time. Extending over the pavilion’s three levels and courtyard, “Sun Stand Still” consists of six individual works: a recreation of a moldy and decaying floor and walls, and a monumental landscape drawing made of metal wool and felt, located on the pavilion’s ground level; a floor installation consisting of puzzle-shaped agricultural plots filled with coffee dregs, located on the intermediate level; a sculptural work depicting a missile or satellite launch pad made of Acrilan fiber, located on the top level; a video projection; and a marble floor installation, located in the pavilion’s courtyard. Taken together, these works create a narrative that may be read as a post-apocalyptic vision, revealing the cost of human hubris in the enterprise of civilization. Weinstein’s project may also be interpreted as a melancholic and poetic allegory of the Israeli story – one composed of miraculous acts and moments of enlightenment as well as neglect and destruction, a story vacillating between a megalomaniac soaring to great heights and a resounding crash.

Weinstein’s unique choice of materials – metallic wool, unraveled felt, Acrilan pillow stuffing, coffee, and mold – enables him to blur the boundaries between uncontrollable organic processes and the controlled, civilized practices of agriculture and technology. By focusing on material manifestations of temporality, he probes the relations between symbolism and concrete appearances. Taken in its entirety, this project addresses the deceptive oscillation between organic and artificial elements, as well as between reality and its countless simulations.

Weinstein, who lives and works in Tel Aviv, is one of Israel’s most prominent mid-career artists. His works have been featured extensively in major international exhibitions, and he is known for his large-scale, site-specific installations and his unique choice of materials, defined by the logic of cheap mass production. Weinstein works from pre-mediated landscape images such as found photographs, transforming images charged with a sentimental and iconic status into fragments of a shattered utopia – a present and future filled with despair. His works reflect the complex contemporary Israeli conception of the landscape and its political, material, and symbolic  resonances.