Tal Shochat, The Art of Disrupting Order

Breaking point

Israeli artist Tal Shochat inaugurated her new exhibition, In Between, on January 15 at the Gutman Museum in Tel Aviv. In this new body of work, Shochat continues her rigorous and unsettling exploration of the tensions that permeate human existence: between order and chaos, control and overflow, destruction and stability. Known for her meticulously staged compositions, she has developed over the years a deeply corporeal and sensory practice, where nature, ornament, family intimacy, and highly constructed visual devices intersect. Her aesthetic—at once precise and visceral—never seeks to reassure. It embraces life and death alike, without hierarchy or taboo, turning the image into a space where contradictory forces are replayed: often violent, always controlled.

The recurring motifs of her work—carpets, trees, family members, symbolic objects—reappear here with renewed intensity. Images seem to proliferate, intertwine, and escape, while being held within rigid, almost suffocating frames. A paradoxical sensation emerges: that of a confined fantasy, a luxuriant imagination trapped within a structure that is too tight.

For this exhibition, Shochat presents seven new works: two videos and five photographs, centered on themes of endings and beginnings, rage and restraint.

In a video that occupies a central position in the exhibition, a tall woman wearing a rust-colored dress advances between rows of pedestals supporting glass vases filled with water and identical bouquets. Armed with a bat, she shatters them one by one. The gesture is precise, powerful, methodical. The explosion of the vases is not a loss of control but a disciplined, almost choreographed act of violence. The character’s anger and determination transform her into a kind of avenging goddess, pulverizing an order founded on repetition, symmetry, and conventional aesthetic harmony.

Leyla

Through this work, Shochat also confronts her own aesthetic inclinations: a taste for beauty, harmony, and things being “in their proper place.” The exhibition space becomes a battlefield where the obsession with order disintegrates under the blows delivered by the heroine. The catharsis is twofold: something breaks irreversibly, yet something else endures.

Surrounding this scene of destruction, two dark photographs frame the space: on one side a group of girls, on the other a group of boys, their silhouettes almost charcoal-black, like silent witnesses. Facing them, a seated woman—rooted, stable—appears to guard the site.

Maor, sleeping boy

In Between is not merely an exhibition about destruction; it is an existential proposition. Shochat invites viewers to take pleasure in rupture, in liberating vandalism, as a vital necessity when order turns into a prison.

Born in 1974, Tal Shochat lives and works in Tel Aviv. She is a graduate of the Midrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College. She received the Young Artist Award in 2005 and the Ministry of Culture’s Award for the Encouragement of Creativity in 2015. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Israel and abroad and is included in major public and private collections, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The exhibition is on view until May 16, 2026, at the Gutman Museum, 21 Shimon Rokah Street, Tel Aviv.

Caroline Haïat