Exhibitions

The Museum's collection of African ethnographic artifacts, which has remained hidden from public view for 30 years, includes approximately 1,000 pieces, donated by avid collectors and dedicated donors from around the world, who have intensely explored specific cultures and regions of Africa. These works were once exhibited at the Haifa Museum of Ethnology, founded in the early 1950s and active on Arlozorov Street until 1995. In unveiling these works again, "Africa Calling" calls on its viewers to immerse themselves in the diverse and vibrant cultures of Africa.

For the exhibition, the Museum invited artists to create new works, exploring how digital thinking, concepts, and tools take on substance in the physical world, shaping artistic practice and material expression. Their works delve into what happens when digital aesthetics encounter physical limitations—people, matter, and unpredictability—and what it means when technology becomes an integral part of our bodies and identities.

A north wind blows through the collection of Haifa Museum of Art. The museum’s location in the city of Haifa is reflected in its collection, which contains many works by artists based in Haifa and the north, attesting to Haifa’s unique identity: as a port city, the relation to immigrants and refugees repeatedly surfaces in the works; as a workers’ city, many of the works address class issues; and as a city nestled in a unique topography between the sea and the mountain, the works delve into interrelations between the earthly and the spiritual. From its focal point in the north, the collection also converses with Israel’s art centers, with Arab culture, and with Western modern art: turning south, to artistic practice in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; east, beyond the Jordan Valley; and west, to what is happening overseas.

Rachel Anyo creates a new visual image of a feminist Ethiopian woman. She recruited 13 differently-aged women of Ethiopian origin for the project, and together they explored their culture by working in the collage technique. Based on a database of images prepared by Anyo from her family albums, the participants created collages under the guidance of the artist, who deconstructed and reconstructed them into new collages all her own.

Equipped with white overalls, compassion and courage, Liron Hana Ohayon and Amit Gavish lead an interdisciplinary artistic act in the streets of Haifa. They gathered six women who recently moved to Haifa for a joint creative process, which included a confession and a statement of identity aimed at pushing the boundaries of involvement in the space. The six video works on view are elaborations of six acts of female healing, whose gist is coping together with personal passions and fears.

Energy does not disappear or dissipate; it only changes form. In fact, since the Big Bang, the mass of the universe has been constant, only changing its shape and state of aggregation. Ella Littwitz revisits the ancient space around the Dead Sea and Mount Sodom, an area where the winds of Creation prevail. She explores the substances she finds there as being in the midst of change, a transformation in which the artistic act can take part.

In her works, Hadar Saifan functions as a soldier: she spots aircraft, clears routes, patrols evacuated settlements, and shoots with her camera. The invasion of Israel in October 2023 reinforced the role of civilians in protecting their homes—people who felt they had been abandoned by the state and chose to fill the vacuum left by the official institutions themselves.

Merav Sudaey's exhibition space was transformed into a cave with painted walls, a ritual site for an ancient goddess. She draws inspiration from wall paintings in Hindu and Buddhist temples and monasteries, replacing all the figures with the image of one woman, her own. This painterly installation thus consists of a stratified series of self-portraits in which Sudaey examines her naked body as an object for painting while looking into herself as a subject. Applying diluted paint to the canvas, she heaps transparent layers one atop the other, which conceal or reveal spectral underlayers of female nudity. The two-dimensional canvas is rendered three-dimensional, as it were, as additional painterly worlds are waiting to be discovered under the top layer of paint.

The nuances, the different textures, the emanation of light or its concealment, what is highlighted and what is relegated to the shadows: in Lihie Talmor's works, every detail has a meaning and every action has a purpose. Her work is centered on a search for something that was lost, but left traces on site, despite the vicissitudes of time. The freedom inherent in printmaking enables reversal—transforming the documented into imaginary, and introducing tension between reproduction and fiction, between memory and invention. Through print, Talmor sheds light on dark chapters in the history of a place, uncovering truths and secrets hidden beneath the surface, and discussing the innate tensions between history, man, and place.

Collage is an important technique in art. It allows you to connect different worlds and create things that only exist in the imagination. To create a collage, you cut images from different sources, take them apart, and then put the pieces together in a new, surprising way. The odder the cuts and links, the more striking the resulting new creation.