Ritual 0
Ritual 0 marks the genesis of Ree’s practice—an experiment in how collective symbolic acts might still hold transformative power, even (or especially) in a moment of political rupture and personal disorientation. Conceived as a closing gesture for the Institute for Freedom Research, an artist-run initiative in Tel Aviv that was abruptly evicted in the spring of 2021, the piece was staged amid layers of structural collapse: the institution itself, the political climate, and the artist’s own shifting sense of home and identity.
The Institute—a temporary pseudo-institute founded by artist Tamir Lichtenberg—was housed in the Studiobank, a former bank building converted into cheap artist studios. In May 2021, under the pretext of structural instability, the artists were told to vacate immediately. This coincided with a wave of violence across Israel-Palestine: rockets fired at Tel Aviv, anti-Palestinian mobs in mixed cities like Jaffa, and growing unrest that made the very idea of "freedom" feel both urgent and impossible.In response, the final gathering spilled into the street—half protest, half wake. Ritual 0 emerged spontaneously from this energy. An abandoned satellite dish, cluttered with detritus, became a vessel. Drawing from early research into incantation bowls—magical ritual objects from Late Antiquity used to ward off demons and illness—Ree invoked the four elements, each aligned with a collective desire. At the close of the ritual, the dish was flipped upright and repurposed as a sonic altar. One by one, participants spoke the names of their “demons” into the vessel, allowing their voices to echo and dissipate into the night air.
Materially, the work embraced immediacy. As in much of Ree’s practice, Ritual 0 was constructed from found, ordinary objects: a satellite dish, tapwater, dirt from the nearby lot. The act of making mirrored the logic of divination—much like tarot, where meaning arises not from fixed symbols but from their contextual resonance. A material appears; it is charged through intention and incorporated into the moment. The construction becomes part of the ritual. The ritual becomes a form of composition. What might look haphazard is actually a live negotiation with symbolism, space, and energy.In a society where spirituality is often confined to institutional religion or fringe mysticism, Ritual 0 posed a subtler question: what remains when we remove the scaffolding of belief?
What unconscious residues linger in our bodies, our nervous systems, our collective imagination? “The gods have become diseases,” wrote Jung, referring to the psychic weight of repressed archetypes. But perhaps they can also become tools—if not to be believed in, then to be played with, spoken to, or named aloud.Ree’s personal history—raised in an Orthodox Zionist environment, later rejecting both organized religion and nationalist narratives—underpins this approach. Her work resists official channels: it is post-religious, post-institutional, self-taught, and unapologetically nonlinear. Ritual 0 emerged not from an art school curriculum, but from a need to make sense of a life unraveled, reoriented, and reenchanted on new terms.
The power of ritual, as the artist understands it, is not in precision, but in presence. In opening a temporary portal—especially in times of collapse—not to offer escape, but to reconnect with something vast, ancestral, and human.
