Exhibitions

Wadi - is a hydrologic geological formation, and a term in Arabic, Hebrew, and English describing different forms of seasonal flow, associated with areas with little precipitation.
In Haifa, however, a wadi is also a mental state; the city's wadis are used for momentary respites from the routine, for various games, and for alternative community gatherings. At the same time, they also embed darkness, all sorts of waste, and complex ecosystems of flora and fauna, which exist in a world parallel to everyday life.
The exhibition addresses different manifestations of this alternate universe.

The exhibition juxtaposes three works by international artists delving into the universal characteristics of the gestures of the protesting body, with four series of photographs from four significant protests in local history.

Artist Jaro Varga came from Prague to Haifa three times during the last year, visits which he spent tracing the footsteps of famous Germans and German culture in the city. A past visitor who attracted him in particular was author Karl May, who came to Haifa in 1899.

Imagine a train ride across a pristine landscape. There is no building, no factory, not even a road in sight. Nothing. Just hills and sand. Through the train window it seems like a place untouched by human hands, but this is obviously an illusion. If we were to stand in the landscape and look towards the train, we would see that the landscape is scarred with iron tracks. Our environment is nearly always shaped by people, who add their own touch to nature, and there is almost no place that is truly natural. But what if humans and nature could live together in better harmony?
You are welcome to design the mountain yourself: plant trees on its slopes and peek into the secrets it reveals through the windows hanging above. Join the ride through the designed landscape to observe it from the inside out and from the outside in.

Oded Hirsch's works are based on detailed scripts for absurd situations. He invents challenges and problems that need to be solved, providing a complete scenario for their solution. The solution is usually just as far-fetched as the challenge, and the works leave the viewer wondering about the very necessity of these actions: Why is it necessary to pull out a tractor buried in the ground, lift it upwards, and introduce it into the museum?
The pulse and breathing rates are among the vital signs by which physicians determine whether a person is healthy, sick, or dead. The vital signs are directly affected by one's emotional state: they change in moments of calm or excitement, fear or infatuation. The exhibition features some of the real products of these vital signs in works of art from the past twenty years. Lines, lights, and sounds are generated as the work of art is adapted to the heartbeats and the cycle of inhalation-exhalation, which determine the structure of the work. This rhythm—whether calm and regular, fast and fidgety, or completely still—may guide one into the depths of consciousness. Alternatively, it can make us conscious of those who are bleeding or those who have been deprived of air to breathe.

Over the past year, Chen Cohen photographed her medical routine in various clinics and at the Bnei Zion Medical Center in Haifa. She focused on the medical instruments and her encounters with the medical staff—meetings intended to treat the body, which were full of tenderness and compassion, healing the soul, too. She did not document the treatments from a seemingly objective position, or one that emphasizes the difficulty of being the object of a medical examination, but rather performed for the camera. She came to the check-ups as a healing shaman, always dressed in the same long black dress, which is contrasted with the white space. The camera she installed in the clinic transformed the event into an artistic act addressing beauty and love.

Noga Etzioni Yudkovik engages in sculpture and drawing. Her studio functions as a factory, where she works with woodworking machines, lathes, and various tools, in materials such as oak-tag, cork, and rubber—cheap materials that instill an ascetic feel. In a laborious process, she concocts, takes apart, and reassembles from these diverse materials objects that seem to have been made of wood. Ostensibly heaped at random, these objects are the result of careful planning, during which the artist examines the interrelations between the sculpted parts, and between the sculptures and the space, in a practice that combines sculpture and architecture.The works are distinguished by a perception of interpersonal dialogue as an artistic quality. Domestic kitchens, public institutions, the threshold to the street—all of these function as scenes of action and studio spaces where the works are created. Presence is the main creative material and the foremost value in this artistic genre, which pushes aside art that aims for visibility in favor of art that seeks to be experienced while taking shape.

Our body works all the time, even at night, when we sleep: the heart beats and pumps blood to all parts of the body, the lungs fill with air and empty, and there are many other systems in the body that work nonstop so that we feel well. These actions produce heat, which is known as "body heat."
Panels painted in shades of red and blue hang along the wall. They were painted with a special paint sensitive to heat, which disappears in contact with the skin. Try touching the panels and see how your body heat affects the paint.

The exhibition focuses primarily on early 20th century prints by German artists, all from the museum's collection. Its title was borrowed from the Sturm und Drang movement—a literary movement in 18th-century Germany, emphasizing expression of the individual's deepest and most intense feelings on the assumption that the human psyche is dominated not by reason but by raw, stormy, and unexpected emotion.

Hard and Soft

Works from the Gottesman Etching Center

In essence, printmaking generates images that are based on transference: transference from one surface to another. In fact, one of the first creative activities with which children experiment is printing, when they dip their hands in paint and leave their imprint on paper. Over the years, the art of printmaking has become more sophisticated, and the prints on view attest to the wealth of possibilities inherent in the field.