When it comes to artistic installations and their constituent materials, we thought we’d seen it all—fabrics, mirrors, books, digital screens and even plastic trash from the Pacific Ocean, you name it, it’s been done. But we stand corrected: behold an installation made out of wheat, and not just any wheat but a selection of near extinct varieties. Designed by Israeli architect Nati Tunkelrot and Tel Aviv-based Israeli designer Guy Mishaly, and presented during the Jerusalem design week 2018 in June, ‘Goren’ is a mesmerizing homage to the most important agricultural crop in the western world as well as a forewarning to the dangers that commercial agriculture poses to its diversity and uniqueness.

Created in collaboration with researchers and farmers at the Weizmann Institute and the Volcani Center in Israel, the installation takes its cue from wheat’s 12,000 year-old history in the Middle East and the thousands of genetic variations that have evolved, many of which have been driven to the brink of extinction during the last 100 years due to the predominance of a few high yielding strains. By using some of these endangered varieties, Goren references the molecular building blocks that make up their unique genome that humanity is in danger of losing, as well as visually demonstrating the unexpected variety in size, shape and colour between them.