Malka Inbal’s new series of works projects power and sensitivity. Her works are meticulous and enchanting, but harbor latent memories and pain. Her current exhibition consists of a series of photographs in a certain developmental sequence, featuring rusty bins on which the artist has projected beams of light through paper slits. In the process, she chose the most successful images documenting the angles of the projected beams. The search for the right beam of light is an extension of her preoccupation in the previous series, Pathology of Rust (2012). However, the photographic language in the current series, unlike the previous one, is one of a set of photographed images that have undergone computerized processing – adding further layers of transparency, size distortions, blurring, and highlighting of darkness. The series of photographs is perceived in one fell swoop, and when one gazes at it each of the works seems to heighten the one before it.
Inbal created this series after a personal crisis, which is represented here in the rust effect – a theme that has consistently appeared in all the works, as an essential element. She uses rust as a metaphor for a reality of ephemerality and the decay of matter, like the transient nature and decline of the body, which bears complex physical and emotional baggage. The disintegration of matter, which as mentioned is related to that of the body, is indicative of natural, slow, and inexorable processes of wear and tear.
Inbal communicates her images through the patches of rust that are distributed throughout the space in seemingly improvised fashion, creating the illusion of continuous, slow, and mesmerizing movement. These patches form various textures – of materiality, forms, and colors – that differ from each other with subtle nuances. Thus, random material and formal textures emerge, featuring black and dark hues combined with light and warm shades of yellow, orange, red, gold, and brown. The rust component becomes a kind of tactile, aesthetic underlay that highlights the imaginary materiality, producing a mesmerizing textural effect.
The patches of rust represent states of suffering and pain, which appear gradually and in varying rhythms. Their alternating appearance and disappearance, their states of visibility and blurring,  and the changing shapes and shades are all formal expressions of the changing intensities and characteristics of those pains. Lighter-colored areas – where the patches of rust are light and airy, and are dispersed throughout – represent an ebbing of the pain’s intensity. Inbal raises the definition of her personal suffering to the level of conceptual abstraction, while presenting an aesthetic array of forms and marks that attest to the internal turmoil within her. The viewer’s gaze moves in constant play between the utter darkness and the gleaming areas in the various paintings, each hosting a coherent set of delicately treated forms. These forms, which are only suggested and not clearly defined, are engaged in a dialogue with their surrounding background.
The play of projected light on the patches of rust creates elusive dots that fade in the air, as though floating freely on the surface of the paper, like a celestial writing with hidden messages. The photograph created is a deceptive representation of cosmic light, marked by the presence of the same flashes of light flickering out of the darkness. The twinkling points of light produce a delayed, slow, and inquisitive gaze, that tries to understand the nature of the phenomenon unfolding before it.
Inbal’s photographs highlight her skill in creating a sense of magic in the act of photography. She draws the viewer into a world where there is a tension between the tangible, real, and visible layer and the layer of hidden and metaphysical meaning – a world that contains magical a-temporal moments within the seemingly celestial occurrence. The photographs dwell in the twilight zone, oscillating between the revealed and the concealed, between the present and the vanished, between emptiness and fullness, between the formal and the abstract, the robust and the fragile, pain and its absence.
In talking about her works, which as previously noted were born of personal hardship, the artist says: “I try to touch the pain through introspection. It is a necessary action for me, in order to release the pain. Making is a kind of coping. The works were created from my personal existential situation, which had become an integral part of me. I bring all that to my work.” In fact, the series could go on being created, continually, depending on the intensity of the pain that she feels. The pain is described in a “stylized” way that is unique to it, depending on the feeling that day. Although these pains dominate her daily routine, she does not give in to them, but lives with them in a state of constant contention. The rubbed-out areas, which alternately take over the paper and recede, represent the feelings of helplessness that sometimes emerge in the daily struggle.
Suffering preoccupied the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche throughout his years of writing: he examined it in the broader human context, and dealt with its role and value in human life.[1] Nietzsche believed that suffering is a necessary by-product of loftier values, and does not establish values ​​itself. In his view, this approach highlights the greatness of man and the nobility of his spirit. In Jungian psychology, the shadow is a simile for mental elements, such as evil, denial, repression, pain, and others. Getting to know them makes way for hope, so darkness may play a positive role. “There is no attainment of consciousness without pain,” Jung argued[2] – that is, the very act of grappling with pain enables the discovery of deep-seated mental powers that recharge a person with a renewed power of action.
Similarly, the rusting surfaces, which in the photographs, symbolize emotional vulnerability and suffering, also appear to represent coping and control of the situation amidst constant containment of the difficult emotional and physical condition, an expression of intense mental powers. Those of Inbal’s photographs that do not deal directly with suffering make possible a process of self-discovery and coping ability. However, the long-awaited end does not come easily: the pale patches of rust have not yet taken over all parts of the paper, attesting to to some degree of pain. The works represent a process of coming to terms with the inability to change the existing situation, and a willingness to learn to live with it. However, even in her recent photographs it is still possible to recognize the existence of hope, as a promise for tomorrow.