Knowledge of the Serpent
 
Solo exhibition at the Mishkan Museum for Art, Ein Harod
Curator: Avi Lubin, 2025
Photos: Elad Sarig

Some twenty years ago, Assi Meshullam began working on his ambitious and ongoing artistic-literary-theological project—constituting the “Order of the Unclean”: a religious-artistic-philosophical order that puts forward complex relations between ritual and violence, between paganism, monotheism and secularism, between defilement and holiness, and between a methodical doctrine and carnal lust. It began with “Ro'achem,” a book Meshullam had written in 2005 recounting the tales of Ro'achem, a hybrid of human figure and canine genes. With messianic fervor and quasi-biblical language, he conveys to his readers the gospel of the new doctrine, saturated with profanity, carnality, and lawlessness. Much like the exhibition that was the framework for the book's creation, Meshullam's writing features human and animal elements, reason and impulse, darkness and hope.

In the two decades that followed Meshullam has solidified the "Order of the Unclean." He has developed a private iconography that incorporates artistic, theological, philosophical, mystical, biographical, and psychological sources, and has produced a series of exhibitions, books, artworks and religious objects for the order and as part of it. This project is complex, ironic, critical, and ambitious. It engages in an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish religion, the Hebrew culture and language, and the ancient history of the Land of Israel. Meshullam's personal iconography integrates the private with the theological and the political.

In the exhibition " Knowledge of the Serpent," Meshullam reveals the "Secrets of the World" according to the new-old religion, this time using Kabbalistic jargon and writing that resembles amulets, spells, and occult calligraphy. He creates a visual and thematic space full of secrets and encryptions, in which the prophecy of Ro'achen blends with the violence and destruction of contemporary reality. Meshullam's project is a combination of a methodic doctrine and a stream of consciousness. It addresses the question of violence perpetrated in the name of purity, presents a conflict between tradition and savagery, and is embedded with self-portraits in various contexts: religious (Jacob), national (Herzl), and mythological (a sphinx with the body of a lion, large wings, and a snake's tongue.) Meshullam references and tampers with biblical tales such as Jacob's Ladder, the Binding of Isaac, the prophetic tirades of biblical prophets, and, naturally, the story of the primordial serpent who tempted Eve to sin by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as recounted in the book Genesis.

Created especially for the colonnaded axis of the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, the exhibition has the structure of a cathedral. Along the entire length of the axis, grids of monochromatic wooden panels hang, featuring gates with pairs of cherubim, demons, sphinxes and priests—gatekeepers who divide and connect between life and death, vision and destruction, redemption and heresy. Originating from imagery of gates in Jewish manuscripts found in the Mishkan’s Judaica collection, they are structured like a Talmud page that includes, alongside the main text, commentaries, explanations and additions, as well as images such as a goat-man holding a knife in his hand, a scapegoat turned slaughterer; snakes swallowing each other, recalling Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in an eternal cycle; people wearing bird-beak masks that resemble plague doctors or the characters in the Birds' Head Haggadah; there is also a priestess holding a scythe like that of the angel of death, wrapped in a vine, suggesting birth and blossoming.

 

- Avi Lubin, Knowledge of the Serpent, 2025.