Tal Engelstein’s (Tel Aviv, 1989) artistic projects often question themes of sanitary failures, states of paralysis and intentional self-destruction. By working with living organs that transform and evolve during the exhibition, the artist is creating environments that evoke a tension between duration and stagnation - where a fragile fleeting moment seems to freeze or degenerate. In the presence of the biological processes Tal Engelstein is dealing with, we are invited to an intimate encounter with natural materials, sometimes in a way that might defy our ability to stand aloof. His artistic objects become then Abjects, as they signify entities arousing the contaminated and contemptible that bring us to the point where an immediate identification leads to recoil.

In the center of his current exhibition Butthash, Tal Engelstein is experimenting with the phenomena called Jenkem. His video-art piece, presents us this extreme personal and physical form of recycling - in an attempt to blur the distinction between the delusional and the concrete, one inhales reproduced gas emitted by his own body waste.

This reproduced gas is actually methane, also known as swamp gas, one of the materials that largely contributes to the Ozone depletion and in turn to global warming.

The notion of the swamp underlies as well in the other elements of the exhibition : whether it would be his installation of sap - the secretions of the woods - that covers the glass wall of the gallery and by that hazes the outer sphere, or the frogs sculptures in which the video’s sound-system is implanted. While artificially giving them a voice, the artist allegedly requests to revive them, to oppose their natural process of decay.

It seems the marginal zones and the drastic actions Engelstein is investigating in this exhibition, unfold his attempt to re-locate the living body in relation to its planet.

- Noam Alon, 2019