Yesterday I saw a sculpture that punched me in the gut.

I've been at the Ralli Museum in Caesarea, a museum for contemporary Latin-American art, with my wife and a friend. It's a small yet dense museum, filled with paintings and sculptures from different South American artists. We toured the first floor for a while, discussing what we saw, what we liked, what we didn't, when we walked up to the second floor and were immediately confronted with this.

Salvador Dalí's Unicorn.

image taken by Talmor Yair at the Weizmann Institute of Science

More pictures can be found here.

It took me a hot second to realize what I was looking at, but once I did I felt a chill run up my spine. In front of me there was a huge bearded unicorn, more akin to mythology than to the modern kid-friendly incarnation, standing triumphant with one front leg raised. In front of him is a curvy wall with a heart-shaped opening. The unicorn's gigantic horn pierces through the opening, oozing blood from its tip all the way down the wall. And right below it, tiny by comparison, is a woman, naked and splayed on the floor, her face covered with her arms.

This is an artistic depiction of sexual violence.