The concept of nature has acquired a new relevance in the hyper-technological age, leading many artists to reflect on artificial environments, where one is unable to trust what is real and what is not. A significant number of artists today challenge the gap between traditional perceptions of “nature” and “culture.” In many cases, they introduce new understandings of the sublime that transform its romantic associations with a sense of awe.

UNNATURAL presented scientific, romantic, conceptual, poetic, sensual and ecological conceptions of nature through a variety of strategies that reflect advances in technology in the twenty-first century. The works in the exhibition question conventional means and methods of representing the natural world, and metaphorically embody both the paradoxical longing to fuse with nature and the threat embedded in such fusion. The works in UNNATURAL thus reflect a cultivated, synthetic, manipulated nature, which includes allusions to science as manifestations of a reality oscillating between the real and imaginary.

The artists selected for UNNATURAL come from diverse cultural backgrounds and work in a wide range of media: video, photography, sculpture and installation. 14 out of 24 artists are Israeli-based which charges the exhibition with a political accent that relates to Nature, territories and landscape in critical ways. In the contemporary Israeli context it is impossible to disassociate the landscape from the politics transpiring around it. Representations of landscape and/or Nature in Israeli art are never naive, and certainly not romantic. They are scorched with the fire of conflict and fervor of internal controversy.

UNNATURAL is a metaphor for the postmodern era; an allegory of the far-fetched fusion of reality, fantasy and simulation. At the same time, it reflects the freedom of imagination and the wonders of simulation technology, which make the inconceivable conceivable.  The location of this project in Miami Beach – a subtropical, botanically lush barrier island that was built on a filled coral reef where even the beach sand is artificially imported—strengthens the tangible relationship between the “nature” and the “natural.”