Everything That Rises Must Converge
2018
Manjam Lab
Curated by Rabie Salfiti and Layan Assayed
In collaboration with artists: Hadi Khalil, Rbie Salfiti, Maiada Aboud, Elias Wakeem and May Herbawe
Haifa, Israel
In this work, the simple action of bouncing an apple on one’s belly becomes a charged symbolic gesture. Participants were invited to lie down into a white cloth and place an apple on their abdomen, allowing it to rise and fall with the movement of the body. The white cloth suggests ritual, vulnerability, exposure, and perhaps purification, while the reclining body becomes both a resting place and a site of burden.
The apple carries long associations with temptation, knowledge, guilt, and inherited sin. When placed on the belly, it is no longer an external object but something almost carried by the body. Its movement depends on breath, muscle, and pulse. The participant does not simply hold the apple; they sustain it, balance it, and repeatedly return it to motion. This makes the act feel like a physical metaphor for carrying sin: not as an abstract moral idea, but as something embodied, intimate, repetitive, and difficult to release.
The belly is also significant. It is a place of digestion, birth, instinct, and vulnerability. To bounce the apple there suggests that guilt or transgression is absorbed into the body, carried in the center of the self. The action is gentle, even playful, yet uneasy. The apple rises, falls, and returns, echoing the title’s idea of convergence: what rises does not disappear; it comes back, meets the body again, and insists on being felt.
Through participation, the work transforms viewers into carriers of meaning. The sin is not represented from a distance; it is temporarily placed upon each body. The white cloth gathers these bodies into a shared space, making the act feel collective rather than purely individual. In this way, the work reflects on inherited guilt, social responsibility, and the fragile line between innocence and burden.
