The inspiration for the exhibition Many Waters was the story of the flooding and sinking of Rungholt — a prosperous port city on the German coast, which was flooded in a storm and sank beneath the waves of the North Sea in the 14" century. For 600 years, the scientific and archeological finds of the “lost city” were inconclusive. But recently, state-of-the-art scanning technologies have led to the discovery of new finds that support the historical story. Real or mythical, Rungholt was flooded and sank beneath the water. Legend has it that to this day, the tolling bells of the sunken church can still be heard by fishermen and hikers walking along the shores near the presumed site of the lost city.

The myths of the lost continent Atlantis and Noah’s biblical flood resonate in this story, hinting at the flood as a punishment for the sins of mankind and the exploitation of natural resources (the over mining of salt in the area led to financial prosperity, but also weakened the resistance of the land to flooding). So, the current climate crisis ties into the historical story, alongside apocalyptic prophesies of a future flood.

The works in the exhibition bring together the historical and the mythological, touching on urgent climate and ecological issues, as well as questions of faith. They combine real events supported by physical evidence, with the stories associated with those events that have gained romantic authenticity, creating an imagined archeology. Raff weaves a sci-fi tale beyond time and place, echoing ancient myths on the one hand and contemporary global processes on the other hand. Reflecting on relics of the past and present, and on the future memory that they shape, Raff raises questions about history repeating itself, about the future for coming generations, and about the threat of physical and spiritual decline that looms over us.

The dark space of the gallery is turned into an endless marinescape, at the same time ancient and futuristic, which combines video, sculpture, and photographic works. At the heart of the video animation that conjures up a gloomy underwater landscape swings a giant bell, a fictional testament to the sunken church, the crisis of faith, and the dissolution of existing social orders. Against all laws of physics, the bell continues to sway and ring even underwater, as though echoing the spirit of faith and the hope it inspired in the past that refuses to die, or else wishing to warn of an imminent, perhaps ecological,
catastrophe. The video creates a space in which the forces of nature and culture spar with one another in a continuous loop: The forces of nature may have destroyed the religious structure and the social order it represents, but the sounds of the past continue to ring in the deep.

Alongside this work, two video works filmed on the coast of Israel reference the physical performance familiar from Raff’s works, in which she tries to affect the surroundings with her body. The new works portray two female figures, mother and daughter, in a futile activity that attempts — in vain — to control the level of the sea or stop its crashing foam. Both women are in a static position: one is standing vertical and yielding, and the other lies horizontally, taut and tense; one is holding a hosepipe, motionlessly pouring water into the sea, silently surrendering to the fate she brings on herself; the second is struggling to stop the waves that wash ashore, to stop the impending disaster with her body. The
position of the young woman in the middle of the sea brings to mind the figure of Venus emerging from the waves in Botticelli’s famous painting. But the young figure in the video, the artist’s daughter, resignedly disappears beneath the waves, and in contrast to Venus, returns to her aquatic origin, the womb of the world.

The videos are accompanied by photographs and sculptures that simulate remnants of fossils of the past or future, human lungs that became extinct due to lack of use and were salvaged from the sea as an imaginary fossil, a charred conch, and seashells collected on the shores of the Mediterranean and scanned with their opening facing the eye of the scanner. The scans are blackened until the image is almost completely faded into the darkness of the abyss, glimpsed as a faint vestige of sight out of the darkness of blindness. The openings of the shells resemble bodily orifices, echo chambers, or perhaps black holes that allow passage between different times and different spaces; containers that hold a secret, inviting us to dive in, and hinting at a deep inner space that remains hidden from view.

Ravit Harari