ABSTRACT
On a stormy Jerusalem night in the winter of 2007, a friend and I went to an experimental art exposition, which was titled “The Golem: From Mysticism to Technology, from Judaism to Universalism.” The Golem Project was co-curated by the Sala-Manca Group (on which I will elaborate later) and The Lab, which is a relatively new center for performing arts in Jerusalem. I was familiar with earlier works of Sala-Manca artists, which were always inspiring. They typically included various art installations, kinetic sculptures, video works presented in public spaces. I was attracted to, and even fascinated by, Sala-Manca's activities, also because they felt not very coherent and had an avant-garde touch to them. Through the Golem Project, Sala-Manca and The Lab sought to explore the haunting and daunting images of the Golem, an animated anthropomorphic being which has reappeared in Jewish traditions and texts throughout the centuries, and which usually has a semblance of a weird and sometimes monster-like appearance (perhaps akin to Frankenstein's monster).
