Ladder Holders

In modern Hebrew, the word “Tophet” (Inferno) means catastrophe, horror, and destruction, of excruciating pain, protracted torture, or the scene of disaster and ruin. This semantic wealth is inherent in the biblical instances of the term, whose origin in the custom of sacrificing children and passing them through fire as part of the polytheist worship of the Moloch deity at Gehenna in the outskirts of Jerusalem. This context has contributed to another sense of the term – a site of great fire, a pyre, or crematorium, which serves as the etymological element identifying “inferno” with “hell” (geihinom). With regard to the ancient pagan ritual, medieval exegetics have interpreted the word “inferno” as related to drumming (tifuf), suggestive of the Moloch priests’ practice of beating drums in order to silence the shrieks of the children being sacrificed. According to some exegetics, the latter were instructed to burn themselves on the white-hot arms of a copper idol heated by sizzling embers.
In the Frankensteinian allegory Vengeance of the Moloch Deity (1968), Hebrew author Yosef Aricha describes the sense of dread and disobedience arising in the idol itself in view of the cruel ritual, whose true nature it realizes as the ceremonious clamor subsides. “Once the priests stop drumming, clattering and rattling; as the dead of night envelops the environs – then the idol heard the weeping of a bereaved mother groveling in the ashes at its feet, kissing-fondling the charred remains of human bones… Then a hidden shudder ran through him, his metal organs shifted, as if yearning to break free of the ritual platform and flee that horrible, burdensome wilderness… Then something agitated in the Moloch’s heart, a vague sensation raged within him, unfathomable thereto; evil thoughts flickered in his mind about the celebrating hordes and the tyrants sacrificing innocent children in his name.”
The installation presented by Assi Meshullam in Inferno is also speechless, and yet also simmering with the reverberations of myths and ethoses both archaic and contemporary – of worship, death ritual and human sacrifice. Central to the space is the “Moloch”, his iconic-iconoclastic statue, an adorned and horned hybrid figure, in shades of earth and flesh, a kind of mixture of the red heifer of ritual purity and the golden calf of cultic ignominy, blending dichotomous concepts of faith and heresy, sanctity and profanity, religiosity and nationality, victim and victimizer.
On the opposite wall, we see a collection of new works, part pictures, part reliefs, part dedication plaques in muddy-charred materiality, which display a complementary visual and semantic field of an underworld of the darkness of the shadow of death, dominated by demons and hybrid ghostlike creatures. A closer look reveals the artist’s calculated eclecticism, which borrows iconographies and symbols from diverse cultures, eras and mystic and aesthetic traditions – the Egyptian Books of the Dead, Christian catacombs, Renaissance frescos, Tarot cards, modern paintings, found objects and calligraphies – to create a multilayered artistic-ritualistic complex that defies interpretation and refuses to be pigeonholed into distinct conceptual and stylistic categories. A similar polysemy characterizes the deliberately inscrutable archetypes and “incantations” that fill the murky universe – a Promethean-Luciferian Light Bearer, a cross framed as a bull’s-eye or firing sight, angels-demons holding a ladder for souls to climb up to heaven or down to hell – in a way that makes it difficult to determine whether we are faced by an ancient curse or apotropaic talismans for healing and protection.
Inferno follows upon and further hones the anti-purist artistic and religious practices developed by Meshullam in his canonic The Order of the Unclean and Ro’achem. The latter is a pseudo-theological biographic text about a divine leader whose name combines the words “evil” (ro’a) and shepherd (ro’e), parts of whose violent and morally decrepit doctrine are buried under the plaster on the museum’s second floor, as a remnant from the exhibition Affected. The works included in the current exhibition offer a heterogeneous space for reflection – “heterosophic” – as the artist calls it, based on contradiction, inquisitiveness and doubt. In their constant movement between the metaphorical and concrete, the symbolic and real, the ancient and contemporary, the mythical and political, Meshullam’s vision seem to offer supratemporal metaphors for the here and now.