Museum Intervention Works

“Levy's work is both ramified and momentous, addressing environments of many kinds, and filled with stories in which human behavior has played a decisive role.”

 — Noam Gal, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Between 2008 and 2014 Dana Levy produced four single-channel video works that depict her physical intervention in museum displays in Israel, France, and the U.S. She fuses life and death, and confronts the natural world within museum exhibits that reflect man’s concern with ordering and categorizing knowledge – a human pursuit that involves sterilization and death. Levy exposes historic and natural history museum displays to new ways of thinking relevant in current socio-cultural contexts, reminding us that a collection is a living thing and a museum is not a graveyard:

Flying birds spin around the museum ceiling fan in Silent Among Us as their taxidermy counterparts stand in silence.

The stillness of the museum is transformed into unpredictable chaos in The Wake, where Monarch butterflies escape their glass displays one-by-one, as if reawakening from an eternal slumber.

In Dead World Order, the curator of Maison de l’Armateur in Le Havre, France, walks around and rearranges the display in the museum, cramped with artifacts of French colonialism.

Impermanent Display is a collection of paintings and sculptures from the 1920s to the 1970s of the Petah Tikva in Israel, that are hung outdoors on a three thousand year-old Roman mausoleum.