Traditionally, her work has been associated with nightlife. Formerly the designer for the club Haoman 17, many of her earlier works explored the nightclub scene in all of its glitter and youth, darkness and emptiness. Just Be Good to Me shows a significant change of tone. While retaining her earlier trademark focus on light and darkness, in her new installation, Helfman uses motherhood, representations of womanhood and the transition from childhood to adulthood to examine the boundaries between interior and exterior, conscious and unconscious, orderly life and destructive passion.

Just Be Good to Me integrates video, sculpture, installation and drawing. The opening scene of the film, which is screened in the first room of the exhibition, shows Helfman herself diapering her son. The atmosphere is one of cozy domestic intimacy. However as the camera retreats we see that what we thought was a house is only a stage set in the middle of the desert. Playing in the background is the pop song Just Be Good to Me, which, without its rhythmic accompaniment, sounds like a primal human entreaty.

The artist picks up her son and heads for the mountains, recalling the departure of Hagar and Ishmael from Abraham's camp and the beginning of their journey into the desert. Although at first glance the artist appears to be inviting the viewer to a rite of passage from an existence within regulated confines to a life of freedom, in actual fact this is a journey in which uncertainty and terror overcome security and innocence, and there are no moments of exaltation.

Among the devices the installation uses to express movement and the transition from one state to another are objects from the world of dance: a sculpture reminiscent of Degas' famous Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, now grown up and sexually mature; a ballet dancers' barre, twisted out of shape and no longer useable; and a nightclub dancer's pole growing out of a hole in the ground with the dancer's shoe placed beside it. The exhibition's Hebrew name - Bat-Dor - is the same as that of the classical and modern dance troupe that enjoyed great success in the 1970s and was recently disbanded.

The name contains a promise of modernity and a willingness to be mindful of the present, to be "a daughter of the generation" (bat ha-dor) and, indeed, the daughter of every generation. However, the troupe itself did not survive the test of time and the promise was not kept. This is also the case with the transition between the different sections of the installation, which is not linear but complex, offering no solutions and providing the visitor with a simultaneous experience of completion and disintegration. The continual apprearance of mirrors and mirror-like surfaces throughout the exhibition is a reminder to the viewer that s/he is part of the theme, in transition as well. -- www.imj.org.il