I Released All the Animals from All the Cages

Dana Darvish’s solo exhibition The Destruction of All Art, curated by the author, was presented at the Jerusalem Artists’ Studios in Talpiot, January–March 2024. This essay is based on a text originally published in the artist’s book Nefesh Hayah Bi Study for Woman, which was included in the exhibition, as well as on excerpts from the accompanying curatorial text.

At the Metropolitan Museum,
in the Egyptian sculpture wing,
a stone smiles in a woman’s mouth.

—Halina Poświatowska 1

Nefesh Hayah Bi (Living Soul Within Me)

According to an ancient version of the Greek myth of Helen, Zeus fell in love with Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, and pursued her across the world as she repeatedly changed form in an attempt to escape him. At last, when she took the form of a wild goose, Zeus appeared as a swan and raped her in her sleep. As a result of the assault, she laid a white egg. Hermes hid the egg in the womb of Leda, queen of Sparta. “From the egg emerged a tiny, perfect female figure: Helen.”2

The myth links rape and deceitful intercourse with the birth of the most beautiful female figure on earth. It is one of the Greco-Roman legends retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (8 CE),3 a poem that depicts the transformations of gods, humans and other beings into animals, plants, and objects.

Like these metamorphoses—and like a collage—the title of the book Nefesh Hayah Bi Study for Woman (Image 1) is a fusion of two languages. The Hebrew and English parts of the title are not literal translations of one another, but rather an invitation to further reading. The Hebrew phrase "nefesh hayah bi" (living soul within me) is taken from Dana Darvish’s solo exhibition of the same name, which offered a view of the community of stray dogs roaming the outskirts of the desert city of Arad.4

Although the book continues to engage with the ideas and themes presented in the exhibition, it includes only a few images from that series—primarily appearances of the figure of the female dog, the nursing mother, the source of life and bearer of suffering (Images 2, 6).

The English part of the title, "Study for Woman," is taken from one of Darvish’s collage works. It is an appropriated text—originally part of another artist’s work—torn out, erased, and blurred beyond recognition, before ultimately being absorbed into one of her own pieces. Together, Nefesh Hayah Bi Study for Woman, constitutes an open-ended, ongoing study of gender and body, soul and mourning, emptiness and loss, woman and animal.

Sandy5

August 26, 2022

I called the dog in this photograph Sandy. She reminded me of a dog I once loved very much, who had been returned to the kennel. Sandy of the desert was the one who always greeted us with small gestures when we came to feed her and her companions on the outskirts of Arad. I was happy to see her each time, with that shy, sweet smile on her face. She was the first dog I photographed there, and through her I realized that I wanted to continue.

About six months later, I returned to the desert, but she looked different—exhausted, wary, and pregnant again. A typical stray female gives birth three times a year, with ten to twelve puppies in each litter. Their bodies collapse from the strain, and most of the puppies don’t survive due to predators, disease, or poor nutrition. Still, the rate of reproduction is enormous, and throughout the Negev, tens of thousands of such dogs wander endlessly in search of water, food, and shelter. In Israel, the official treatment of these dogs ranges mostly between total neglect and poisoning.

The situation in kennels and pounds is a sad world of its own, where life often ends in black plastic bags. A few months later, the kind man who feeds them told me he hadn’t seen her anymore. On this day, I wish to shed light on the invisible dogs—those who were abandoned and forgotten—in the hope that the stars will align for them too. Many thanks to everyone who has purchased this unique calendar so far. Each item sold saves another dog from suffering. This project is very close to my heart, as it brings together two of my great loves—and through their connection, something truly meaningful happens: the saving of lives.

***

The book emerges from the broader body of Dana Darvish’s artistic work, developed over two decades of photography-based practice. Darvish combines techniques such as montage, handmade collage, video, and photography, which she at times integrates into installations incorporating objects and words. She disrupts the boundaries of images and identities; embeds bodies of different species while exposing the raw joints between them; and withholds, blurs, and reworks information until a new hybrid form is created.

The collage that opens the book (Image 3) references the myth of Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology, a story that blurs the line between seduction and rape. Darvish includes in the collage the original caption accompanying one of the photographs that compose it. The caption indicates that the image documents one of Otto Muehl’s art actions in the late 1960s—performances of a violent nature in which nude women appeared alongside slaughtered animals such as geese (Images 4, 5).6

Darvish’s choice to use an image from Muehl’s extreme performance for the book’s cover immediately conflates woman and animal, highlighting their shared fate. From the very outset, through the concepts of quotation and origin, she asserts a feminist and critical stance toward society and culture, the art field, and its system of representations.

Darvish adopts tactics of gazing at the female body familiar from Western art and culture to disrupt and pierce the historical artistic act, to dismantle and puncture it. Her works and the installations she creates with them emphasize formalistic aspects and the power of beauty—present in the wound, the cut, the imperfection—that underpin her art practice.

From the beginning of her career, Darvish steadfastly presents the perspective of both the animal soul and the female soul, without distinction in the degrees of their pain, suffering, and fracture—a distinction imposed by social constructions and cultural patterns. At the same time, she highlights the close parallels between the female body and the animal body—in movement and gesture, in the instincts of life, and in hidden desires.

A similar perspective can be found in Antoine Fée’s book Do Not Mistreat Animals (Il ne faut pas maltraiter les animaux). In the 19th century, Fée argued that there are close parallels between the human body and the animal body, so much so that one could speak of a familial kinship between them. According to Fée, the knowledge of nature is grounded in a moral and philosophical dimension: it ascribes value and harmony to all things and shows that all animals experience pain. He recommends, among other things, not to enslave animals, to halt cruelty and experiments on them, and to treat them with respect—otherwise, animals will naturally harbor resentment toward humans and may act violently in return. In his view, “we must get used to seeing animals as mysterious beings in many respects.”7

If we take the lives of animals, we disrupt the ingenious order of creation. It is our duty to spare their lives and to treat them with gentleness and compassion. Fée explains that in the past, humanity was defined as the compassion a person felt toward their fellow humans and the acts undertaken to ease another’s suffering. He argues that the modern European interpretation is broader (similar to the principles of Hindu religious thinkers) and that humanity also entails compassion toward animals, “who too are destined to live short lives often interwoven with suffering and death.”8

Animals, he explains, may prey on one another, but in his view, they feed on each other and obey essential needs; this is a matter of survival, not killing for pleasure. Humans, by contrast, place supreme importance on their own needs and desires: they hunt or kill animals and destroy creation for three reasons—self-defense, the need for food, and the pursuit of excitement. Fée argues that the primordial commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is insufficient and must be supplemented with a prohibition against causing suffering to any living creature, including animals. The works in Darvish’s book and exhibition echo this demand toward all bodies—both animal and human—and especially toward women.

The book is a manifesto of a woman/animal who knows the history of art and photography, reveres them, and draws inspiration from their striking aesthetics, yet is also aware of the exploitation, abuse, and objectification of the female figure within them, as well as the grievous injustices of a culture that glorifies the human over the living and the inanimate.

In addition to its bilingual title, Darvish’s book is interspersed with texts, placed at the front and throughout its pages. With no hierarchy between image and word, the word becomes an image; the image becomes a word, a concept. The book opens with words written by Darvish describing a dream, appearing on the very first page:

Last night was exquisitely sweet
I set all the animals free from all the cages
and because it was a dream, they did not return there
and because it was a dream, they did not leave it

The soul's longing to grant freedom to the animals—or perhaps to attain freedom herself—resonates throughout the book, echoing both a climactic moment of a longed-for rescue and a moment of collapse upon the realization of reality.

Simba
September 27, 2019

Yesterday, you were almost adopted. Someone saw you and then chose another—a dog who had just arrived, young and fresh. And you were so sweet, and I hoped so much that someone would finally take you out of that cursed kennel for good, the one that’s so hard for you to return to after every short walk.

My beloved Simba, I pray to the god of birthdays that someone will see, up close, your beauty, the depth in your eyes, and your plea for true freedom.

The Destruction of All Art

The works in the book are not arranged chronologically or as grouped series, and there are no page numbers or graphic divisions. Across the pages appear titles and captions of works by other artists, which have become an intrinsic part of Darvish’s own works (Image 7).

Between 2014 and 2018, Darvish created montage works that were collected into a series titled The Destruction of All Art. They are dispersed throughout the book, reflecting the way they were created over time—not as a single outburst—and establish the rhythm of reading. The series title is taken from a work by the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, which proclaims: The Destruction of All Art Is Art Too, Please Tear This Up. Darvish responded to Vautier’s call: she tore his complete sentence in half and attached to it a segment from a photograph by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész.

In this act, she transformed the sentence into a title that seems to demand the destruction of all art (Image 9). In doing so, Darvish developed a dialogue with conceptual art through textual readymade, while simultaneously enacting the dual meaning of the word "tear"—allowing the images to weep their wounds and convey their significance.

Throughout the Destruction of All Art series, Darvish tore apart canonical images from the history of photography and art, mixing them and creating hybrids between images from different spheres of content. In each work, she retained the original title of one of the appropriated artworks—or even the caption that accompanied it. These titles, imprisoned within the montages, are destabilized to the point of actual destruction of the art and the subversion of the meanings they conveyed in their original works. By emphasizing presence–absence, Darvish interrogates the artistic canon, particularly the photographic canon. Nobuyoshi Araki, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Constantin Brâncuși, Auguste Rodin, and Pablo Picasso are some of the male artists referenced in her works, either through titles or fragments of photographs and reproductions (Images 10, 11).

Darvish cut Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei into parts and created two collages from them: in one collage (Image 12), the lamb’s legs, bound with rope like a martyred saint, merge with fragments of a dismantled clay vessel, reassembled into a new form; in the second collage (Image 14), the lamb’s head completes the shape of a sculpture by another artist from a different time.

Zurburan's Agnus Dei, straddling religious painting and still life, embodies the suffering of all humanity. Darvish appropriates the markers of the sacrificial pose for her works, focusing on the suffering of all animals as part of humanity’s greater suffering and the suffering created by humans. In the exhibition The Destruction of All Art, Darvish paired the collage composed of the lamb’s head with a montage from her Destruction of All Art series (Image 13) and presented them as a single unit.

In the montage, a work by Kertész from the Distortion series (originally presenting manipulations of the female body) is combined with a marble sculpture of a woman’s face, emphasizing the deep sorrow in the tilt of her head and the distortion of her eyes. The grief of God and the grief of the world receive a contemporary interpretation through the abnormal appearances of the tortured and fragmented female body in the 20th century. Four fragments of images seek to proclaim, across a journey from 17th-century art to contemporary art, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the prohibition against causing suffering and pain.

Simba
June 30, 2020

It’s been almost a week since you’re no longer here. You were always the one I saw before my eyes when I came to take the dogs out—the first to be freed from the torment of the cage. My dear Simba, now you can rest from all the sadness you carried within you. A deep apology for not having done enough—my heart is broken with you, forever.

***

Darvish tore a page from an art book featuring a fragment of a marble sculpture of a female torso, whose face is merged with a masculine visage that seems to touch it, and created a collage connecting a woman’s body with a bird’s body (Image 15). It appears as though the removal of a large part of the bird’s body, split into two components, simultaneously becomes the movement of a man’s hand peeling and tearing it from the woman’s flesh—or perhaps the excision instead conceals a surface of the bird’s body.

Ketem
April 18, 2019

It’s been more than a year and a half that I’ve been here, and every year this so-called “Festival of Freedom” is the cursed holiday of the broken-hearted and the imprisoned. The kennels are packed to the brim because everyone abandons their dogs—whether they’re going on vacation or just bought a new couch. They abandon them and go off with a clean conscience to a ski holiday in Hawaii, leaving them behind—frightened and voiceless. And when there’s no space left, things don’t go well.

This is the wonderful Ketem. A beautiful dog who has been waiting a very long time for a home, for the simple reason that she doesn’t try to charm anyone, doesn’t jump excitedly on potential adopters the way she’s expected to. Ketem belongs to herself. She’s joyful and loving in her own way—and that’s exactly what I love about her.

What she loves most is to gaze, with her calm, stoic presence, at the birds flying overhead—and then run with them until they disappear into the distance. She’s a dear friend to all the other dogs, playing with great joy, and whenever a new, frightened dog arrives, she’s the first to gently help them settle in, with her endless tenderness.

It’s a joy to watch her and her quiet beauty. Every soul deserves freedom. Ketem too. But most of the time, she can’t watch the flying birds—the cage closes in on her.

***

Another collage, simultaneously suggesting either disruption of movement or generation of movement, is based on a reproduction of Brâncuși’s Fish sculpture (Image 16). The museum page for the work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York notes that the blue-gray marble block, evoking the color of water, rests on an axis that once allowed it to move and spin. Created in 1930, it is the last, and the largest, of the seven fish sculptures Brâncuși made. Darvish appropriates Brâncuși’s work, as well as his interest in movement. She adds a torn page from a photography magazine featuring a photograph by Ralph Morse, which recalls another famous Brâncuși sculpture—The Kiss—depicting, in an almost abstract manner, a man and a woman in an embrace and kissing.

Darvish aligns the contour of the rock in Fish with the outline of the woman’s arm. This connection pulls the woman into the imagined movement of the sculpture on its axis. Most of the man’s figure is truncated, leaving only a fragment of his arm from the gesture of love, so that it appears as if the woman is compelled to rotate in a looping motion, trapped in a suffocating embrace—a gesture that disrupts the sculpture’s movement on its axis. The collage simultaneously enacts both the illusion of motion and its arrest.

The sculpture of Queen Nefertiti—the most beautiful woman in the world, according to 14th-century BCE Egyptian perception—is displayed in Berlin’s Neues Museum, protected within a glass case. Inspired by this, Darvish created an impenetrable case for her own Nefertiti in the Destruction of All Art exhibition (Images 17, 18). Darvish’s sculpture, made from a detached page of an art book on Egyptian art she found in a dumpster in Tel Aviv’s industrial district, stands on its paper “legs,” balancing between its two-dimensionality and the memory of the three-dimensional volume of the original sculpture. It reveals Nefertiti’s profile in a photograph printed with a quality nearly lost to the world, using a technique that allows viewers to discern every detail and reflects the high craftsmanship of the original sculptor. Her left eye is arched, damaged, and blind, emptied of the stone in which the pupil was originally carved.

The Nefertiti sculpture, discovered by a German archaeologist on the banks of the Nile in 1912, was taken to Germany for preservation and display, and its ownership has since become a point of contention between Egypt and Germany. Under the exhibition title The Destruction of All Art, and in the context of Darvish’s acts of appropriation and destruction in art, the discussion here references both the theft, exploitation, and looting of historical works appropriated by Western culture and the question of ownership and copyright of artworks.

Kesem
June 26, 2020

My Kesem, my love, my beautiful one-eyed girl—the kindest soul this world has ever created—is no longer here. I so wanted to breathe in a little more of that endless heart of yours. Someone dumped you at the shelter gate two years ago, and you were on the euthanasia list because you were already seven years old and had one damaged eye.

I knew that one day your great heart would stop, but you left us too soon, suddenly, and we weren’t there to hold you at the final moment. You arrived to me in Arad at two in the morning, wrapped in a shroud, whole, unharmed, and lifeless. We buried you near Arad, in a place called Yatir, because your soul was yeterah—overflowing, extra.

Thank you, my wise dog, for teaching me love in this world—for your compassion and generosity, for laughter and joy. You bridged the gaps and touched everyone, even those who couldn’t connect to the animal within themselves. You walked among us, Kesem, and with your magic you left us—forever.

My little Kesem, my beloved girl, thank you for your wondrous grace.

Some of Darvish’s works incorporate Hebrew texts using various strategies. Three of these she chose to present at the heart of the book. On a double-page spread, two photographs of sculptures are displayed side by side: a female body with a severed head, and opposite it, a horse’s head with a severed body. Beneath the human body are erased words, from which only the pair “the heads are missing” remains, and beneath the animal, the words “abundance” and “all of it is excess soul” remain after erasure (Image 19).

Darvish explained that "excess soul" (neshama yeterah) is a Kabbalistic religious concept relating to spiritual elevation, an added force. She later recounts how her own soul collapsed after two years of volunteering at a dog shelter, where she witnessed the vital instincts of abandoned dogs and the moment their lives were cruelly cut short (Image 19).

Neshama Yeterah (Expanded Soul)

In the animal state, where “the animal is in the world like water in water,”9 as Georges Bataille explains, there is no hierarchy among animals, not even between predator and prey; they are not opposed to one another. Like plants, animals also lack autonomy in relation to the rest of the world, and thus exist in a state of perfect immanence. According to Bataille, even though we share a common animal origin, the world of animals remains closed to us, and we observe animality from the outside—from a perspective devoid of transcendence, within the limits of human consciousness. Yet the animal is close to us and opens before us a familiar depth: our own depth. “Something delicate, secret, and painfully unnameable extends from the intimacy of the spark that flashes within us into the animalistic darkness.”10

This encounter—or the moment when we are closest to contact with a world devoid of consciousness, in which we recognize our own depth—is described by Bataille as a blow of dazzle, plunging us into the darkness of night. In my understanding, the proximity to a world where the animal moves like water within water is a state Darvish calls “all of it excess soul” (Image 20). In our conversation, Darvish tells me about a line by Yona Wallach that guides her work: “The soul has no body, but the body has a soul.” She wonders how we have forgotten that we are first a living soul, and only afterward humans.

***

Chika
September 26, 2018

The most beautiful thing of all happened yesterday. After a year of being caged, my heart’s wish came true—my Chika finally went home. I couldn’t have asked the universe for a better birthday gift (tomorrow, tomorrow!) than this.

Goodbye, my beautiful girl, my wild alpha dog—go live life to the fullest, the way only you know how to.

My deepest thanks to the wonderful adopting family with a big heart, who adopted Petel and then came back the very next day just to take her too. Everything that had scared others away from adopting her only made them want her more. There’s nothing more moving than that.

As in other instances where Darvish intervenes in titles of well-known works or texts by other creators, she also acts upon The Creation of Eve—a ready-made title appearing on a seemingly blank page—through erasure, omission of information, or correction. Darvish covers the first letter aleph (א) with a het (ח) in her own handwriting, transforming The Creation of Eve into The Escape of Eve, absent in action from the page (as the title appears beneath the shadow of an image that likely once adhered to the paper).

She omits the creation of Adam from the biblical story, leaving only the woman from the pair Adam and Eve (Image 21). In Darvish’s reading, Eve—the primordial female representation—is not expelled but flees alone. Her story becomes a tale of Eve escaping her predetermined fate. Like animals, Eve is afforded no mercy in both the biblical narrative and the history of art. In the absence of compassion, she dissipates and is erased—by choice—from the image itself, or perhaps flees from it. Darvish proposes a subversive alternative for the female figure, and her artistic practice itself becomes an act of protest, offering a future possibility of autonomy and liberation.

Simone Weil presents Creation as God’s voluntary withdrawal from His own infinite fullness, a self-emptying that makes space for the existence of the finite world.12 In her view, after creation, the task of withdrawal passes to human beings: to Adam and Eve, and to us. At creation, we receive a “false divinity,” and immediately afterward, we must strive to undo creation: “Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.”13

Weil explains that exhaustion, disaster, and death help us empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we are born, so that we may understand that we are nothing. She argues that hierarchy must be inverted: instead of wishing suffering away, we should find a way to use it for good and acknowledge human misery—to restore order to its proper place: to reverse the created and the uncreated, the objective and the subjective, the positive and the negative.

In the same way, one must approach pleasure, happiness, and prosperity. Weil describes the task of negating our existence—decreation, the undoing of creation—as participating in the creation of the world, since, she argues, one can hold only what one has withdrawn from. To be nothing means understanding that our being is not ours; we hold it only between the moment of birth and the moment of death. Not to be “I” or “we,” but to be nothing, striving for the death of the soul before the death of the body. Darvish’s Eve uproots her own foundations, uproots her familiar and known “I,” and takes root in the “no-place”—she withdraws. She chooses to exile her figure from the pages of history and culture, to undo creation, and to embark on a journey in search of substance, through her very absence.

Not far from Eve, on another seemingly blank and fragmented page, appear the words “Removed for Conservation.” A closer look reveals that the page is a photograph of a wall with a notice announcing the act: the object that was here—or was meant to be here—has been taken for preservation (Image 22). Was this a work of art? Darvish’s, or that of another artist? Did Darvish document an actual removal of art for conservation, or did she invent it through an artistic gesture? The appearance of the words “Taken for Preservation” alongside "Neshama Yeterah (Expanded Soul)" and "The Creation of Eve ~ The Escape of Eve," all under the title of the book—displayed in the exhibition as a tangible, interactive object—suggests that it is the living soul and/or the female soul, and their representation, that Darvish has taken here for restoration, reconstruction, and the creation of a new, constitutive feminine narrative.

Footnotes

1. Lena Pszczółkowska, Infinity Flows Through Me, translated from Polish by Rafi Weichert (Tel Aviv: Keshev LeShira Publishing, 2021), p. 45. ↑
2. Tzvia Litovsky, Everything Is Full of Gods: Manifestations of the Self and the World in Myth – Essays (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2013), p. 187. [Hebrew] ↑
3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Shlomo Dikman (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), p. 221 (Book VI, line 109). [Hebrew] ↑
4. Darvish’s exhibition, Nefesh Ḥayah Bi, was presented at the Center for Contemporary Art in Arad, 2021 (curated by Leah Abir). ↑
5. All dated texts are quoted from Dana Darvish’s Facebook page, where they were published between 2018 and 2023, the year we began working on the artist’s book and the exhibition in which it was presented. For me, they testify to the absence of separation between Darvish’s personal life and the content of her artworks. They also point to the activist nature of her artistic practice, which at first glance may appear “feminine” and visually powerful, yet carries subversive content that challenges conventional ways of thinking about animals and women. ↑
6. Image 4 from: https://www.artnet.com/artists/otto-muehl/oh-sensibility-wien-1970-h2A4wHZClTMZj7EN6_hRkw2. Image 5 from: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Oh-Sensibility-/F98915B522F31265616B22657ED576C3 (accessed March 26, 2025) ↑
7. Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée, Do Not Mistreat Animals, translated by Michal Ilan (Binyamina: Nahar Books, 2017), p. 33. [Hebrew] ↑
8. Ibid., p. 41. ↑
9. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, translated by John Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 23. ↑
10. Ibid. ↑
11. Yona Wallach, “You Are My Girlfriend,” Performance (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985). ↑
12. Simone Weil, “Decreation," in Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (New York, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 32 ↑
13. Ibid., pp. 32-33. ↑

Ilanit Konopny (b. 1974) is a curator and Head of the Curatorial Studies track in the M.A. Program in Policy and Theory of the Arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. She writes about art and photography and was the recipient of the Galia Yahav Art Writing Grant in 2018. Konopny holds an M.A. in Policy and Theory of the Arts from Bezalel, a diploma in Photography and Digital Media from Hadassah College, Jerusalem, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nefesh Hayah Bi Study for Woman Dana Darvish 2024