Between water and water

In this month-long exhibition, Steven Durbach undertakes an experimental investigation of two foundational texts: the first week of Creation from Genesis and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Drawing on his experience as both a scientist and a Jewish artist, Durbach approaches these texts not as competing explanations of reality, but as distinct systems of knowing that coexist uneasily within a single life.
The project begins with a persistent question: how do different systems of knowledge come to know one another? Science and religion each possess their own internal coherence, methods and truths, yet their points of contact often appear limited. Rather than addressing this tension through argument or interpretation, Durbach adopts a more empirical approach. He enters the texts themselves.
The work can be understood as a form of constraint-based fieldwork within language. Treating Genesis and Darwin's text as territories to be traversed rather than doctrines to be defended, Durbach harvests, catalogues and reconfigures words, phrases and textual patterns. Working within self-imposed constraints, he follows unexpected connections and correspondences as they emerge from the material of the texts themselves. Meaning is not imposed in advance but discovered through sustained attention to what the texts reveal under particular conditions.
The exhibition functions as both installation and live experiment. Throughout the month, Durbach will work in the gallery, allowing the space itself to act as a provocation. The public setting becomes part of the methodology, introducing contingencies, interruptions and new lines of enquiry that may alter the course of the work. What is presented is therefore not simply an outcome but an unfolding process of investigation.
In this respect, the project shares something with both Darwin's commitment to observation and Abraham's willingness to venture into the unknown. Neither reason nor faith is privileged as the primary guide. Instead, the work proceeds through an empirical encounter, entering the wilderness of the texts and following where their words lead.
Situated between scholarship, experiment and performance, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how seemingly incompatible ways of understanding the world might coexist, and what new forms of meaning may emerge when their languages are brought into proximity.