Favors, Enthusiasm and Darkness: Tulsa

O hero of valor, goodness, passion, darkness—the qualities born of nature—bind the soul embodied in the body. Among them, goodness, being without blemish, bestows light and frees one from illness. O sinless one, it is conditioned by an attraction to joy and knowledge. Know that passion and desire, the embodiment of passion, bind the living being to action. Know that darkness, born of ignorance, entangles all embodied beings. It binds them to madness, idleness, and sleep.
Song of God, Chapter 14 (translated from English by Tulsi)

Returning from India in the early 2000s opened for Tulsi a period of deep introspection, leading her on a spiritual journey of more than 20 years of studying ancient texts in the tradition of Indian philosophy and to an encounter with the Song of God—the Bhagavad Gita, one of the East’s most important spiritual treasures. In 2018, she translated the Song of God into Hebrew (published by Resling). The translation was made from the English version written by Howard Resnick, who holds a doctorate in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University. Can the text highlighted in yellow be omitted? It seems very long to me in any case (after all, it is intended for consultation in the exhibition and is not a text in its own right). I would be happy to help.

The series of paintings Tulsi created in 2025–2026 engages in a direct visual dialogue with Chapter 14 of the seminal work. This chapter addresses the three qualities of nature—material and conscious qualities that compose every body, perception, choice, and action in the world: goodness, passion, and darkness. According to this conception, every living being is composed of countless varying proportions and combinations of these three qualities, like three primary colors from which an infinite range of shades can be created, with no quality entirely free of the presence of the others. The exception is the state of consciousness known as “the sublime,” which is also represented in the series as a separate state and dimension.

The three qualities influence a person’s life path and destiny, but their presence is not limited to human beings. According to this conception, all living things and plants carry their combination. The dominant quality affects the nature of communication and relationships, one’s occupation, the way ideas are put into practice, the type of food one eats, the character of the education a person gives their children, the degree of commitment to everything, the choice of leisure and culture, the home in which one lives, and the degree of compassion toward others.

The qualities of nature are not passive attributes but forces that propel us to act. Actions create the habits and conditioning in our lives, and the combination of the qualities shapes morality, knowledge, and our perception of reality. Over the course of life, the combinations and mixtures of the three qualities can change through spiritual practice.

For Tulsi, ancient philosophical knowledge serves as an intellectual and spiritual structure into which she pours currents of consciousness, memories, images, and archetypes. Some of the works in the exhibition give direct visual expression to images appearing in the text, while others incorporate personal interpretation, tastes, and associations evoked in her by the different qualities.

Tulsi’s choice to paint on an unconventional support—geotextile, a nonwoven fabric made of synthetic fibers—imbues the paintings with an additional sensory and conceptual dimension. Geotextile is generally used to separate different layers of soil. She cut the fabric into equal-sized squares and painted on them with acrylic paints, chalks, pencils, and spray paint, using stencils, freehand techniques, graphic motifs, and patches of color. The choice of a support whose purpose is to separate layers of soil takes on an additional meaning in the works: through it, Tulsi separates and filters levels of consciousness, as though they were layers of earth, soil, and sand.

The series of paintings did not emerge from a systematic doctrine or advance planning aimed at achieving uniformity in the number of paintings according to the three qualities. It was born from an ongoing state of consciousness during studio work, and therefore many of the paintings can be interpreted as a mixture of qualities rather than as expressing one distinct quality, thereby conveying the complexity of the three qualities.

Tulsi is careful to create recurring anchors throughout the series—a house, a head, a swan, a crow—and to incorporate motifs relating to the body, the home, and the animal world, alongside distinct characteristics of extreme religious practice, a state of war, and its consequences. In this way, she also touches on contemporary local reality in Israel: the act of war, power and weapons, religious practice, and the mechanisms shaping the lives of individuals and society. The three qualities do not operate only on the individual level; they may also be read as collective combinations shaping our shared reality and the character of this place.

Language editing: Dr. Amit Kama