In order to demonstrate the relations between the reviled and the hidden forces working within society and culture, she has developed an installation platform based on the back-stage front-stage structure of the theatrical stage as one,[2] which brings together simultaneously both the real and the symbolic.
Michal Helfman juxtaposes an owl, the mysterious nocturnal bird that is an ancient Greek symbol of wisdom, with the glamorous nightclub world.
Helfman’s owl, which she has fashioned in the style of the twentieth-century Israeli “Canaanite” movement, resembles a prehistoric fertility figure, are composed of a textured medium that mimics the pink Nubian sandstone of which Nimrod (Itzhak Danzinger, 1939) In the background Roy “Chicky” Arad reads his poem “The Owl,” a work that underscores the tension between the magnificent traditions of the ancient world and the false glitter of today’s consumer society.
[5][6] In her installation Just Be Good to Me (2007) exhibited at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2007, Helfman employed multiple disciplines and media, such as architecture, interior design, sculpture and drawing.
The camera stays where it is, night falls gradually and unevenly, and the nightlight that formed part of the stage scenery is not the desert’s only source of illumination—a lonely domestic light glowing in a vast open space.
The camera moves skywards and the bright stars change into the dazzling globes we saw earlier, before being transformed into the balls of the mobile the baby was playing with at the beginning of the movie, which now starts all over again—and so the cycle continues.
[8] Often collaborating with senior Israeli choreographers, dancers, gymnasts, and musicians, as part of her longtime research on the potential relations between the physical and the visual, Helfman's works constantly challenge the perception of space and movement.