Once Was Lost

Solo at Rothschild
a space for solo exhibitions, created by the Edmond de Rothschild Center especially for members of the Edmond de Rothschild Center network. Its purpose is to foster the development of new projects and facilitate the production of existing works by providing curatorial guidance and encouraging group thinking processes.

A series of exhibitions about loss and processing
Three solo exhibitions at the Edmond de Rothschild Center, floor -1.
May-November 2025
Participants: Adi-Chen Jamui, Noga Sirota, Yuval Katz
Curators: Yaelle Ben-Ami, Yael Jacobs, Lital Bar-Noy

Adi-Chen Jamui | Once Was Lost
Curator: Yaelle Ben Ami

“Once Was Lost” borrows its title from the Church Hymn Amazing Grace. In the context of this exhibition it points to objects that have lost their original purpose, direction, or meaning. The hymn continues: “…but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.” These words reflect the exhibition’s artistic philosophy and method: through acts of caring, transformation, and re-contextualization, what seemed forsaken is rediscovered.

The exhibition Once Was Lost comprises a single installation of objects that appear to be standalone pieces – some inanimate, some organic, and in different states of life. Their placement in a shared space and a distinct order weaves them into relationships and interconnections. This weave creates a fragile material space where loss and preservation coexist, from which a creative move unfolds that seeks to find new life in remnants and fragments, that had almost faded away.

Artist Adi-Chen Jamui works with byproducts – surplus, abandoned, unneeded materials. This is an aesthetic as well as political choice. There is transformative potential in materials that have lost their original function, been marginalized, or have been left behind. They are marked with traces of use, of wear and tear, and of time. They call out for an act of reprocessing, deconstruction, and reorganization.

Jamui mainly uses the Kombucha fungus – a transparent organic cellulose layer generated by a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY). In Jamui’s hands, the Kombucha – which looks and feels like a mushroom, like leather, and sometimes even like human skin – becomes charged artistic material. Through cultivation, processing, and redesignation of the material, using a substance that begins as a biological residue, an opportunity opens up to explore questions of life, decay, preservation, and memory.

Jamui collects discarded, rusted, used saws from workshops and carpentry shops, welding them into curved objects, that at once embody both softness and violence. They recall the jaws of mythological monsters, rounded eggs, a womb and medieval chastity belts.

Jamui also places doomed organic materials around the gallery space: for example, wings of a run-over barn owl that she has dissected, cleaned, and preserved. The sense of loss in the space is essential for indication a possible end, though this end that is not final. Rather it is a draft proposal.

The engagement with the material is done through physical and direct investigation, In which Jamui has developed unconventional processing techniques. However, her work draws inspiration from ancient traditional craft such as preservation, taxidermy, leather tanning, welding, and tattooing, which she reapplies in a personal and vital context. The Kombucha mushroom, being a symbiotic organism, requires constant watering and feeding – a process that goes on throughout the exhibition: a womb-like iron structure wrapped in dry tissue serves as a basin in which fresh SCOBY mat grows. Its life depends on symbiosis, while the artist provides the conditions. Thus, another symbiosis, both biological and artistic, takes place between the artist and the fungus itself no longer just raw material but an active participant in the creative act.

Jamui’s artistic act is rooted in a realm of loss, though it seeks to breath movement into it rather than be mired in it. She concocts pain into matter. Her creative process begins with feverish writing through which she processes her own private losses. The Kombucha, that vibrating layer of life, becomes a substrate for tattooing – an intimate physical act of inscribing memory. This tattooing is an attempt to cling to what has been lost, to freeze a moment in the shifting winds of change, despite the realization that perpetuation is not possible; that everything dissolves, changes, disappears.

The exhibition space transformed into birth canal of sorts. The memory of the raw materials’ previous lives hangs in the air. The walls echo with the sounds of acts performed on the material by way of changing their purpose. Their new incarnation is revealed in the gallery space. This action reflects the constant movement of time, the disintegration of matter, and the sometimes fragile hope for revival and redemption, presenting us with the opportunity to ask: Will all that is transient reawaken? Can one find solace in the midst of catastrophe? Can life be generated from what has been abandoned or forgotten?