The interesting reading of Raff’s beautiful work is also the most melancholy – the women appearing in the works face the sea, and it seems that the “many waters” alluded to in the Song of Songs that will not quench love, neither will they quench the women’s desperate stubbornness. In the first video of the triptych (reading from the right), Raff’s daughter is standing in the sea, irrigating it with a hose, as if she can control the water level. The water is rising and nearly covers her. In the second film, it is Raff herself who reclines facing the sea as waves crash over her again and again. The third film is a video animation in which a large bell covered with salt sediment rocks back and forth underneath the water, its sound heard faintly. The triptych portrays uselessness, breakdown and great loneliness. Hemingway used the title of the poem by 17th century British poet John Donne for the title of his book on the Spanish Civil War For Whom the Bell Tolls. “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tools for thee.” Whether it is an ecological catastrophe or a human tragedy, the disaster impacts us all.

A sculpture of white lungs which seem to be sprouting coral, made through 3-D printing and illuminated beautifully, hangs above the empty well located underneath the building (which other artists such as Ayelet Carmi used in previous exhibitions). The object is very reminiscent of Hirst’s objects, conveying a sensation of rigid yet living sponge, expressing the ultimate, essential “coral-ness.” Its shadow, darkening the already dark wall, once again draws the viewer into realms of doubt and the darkness of the sea and the bell.