Exhibitions

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?
In the absence of other answers, the main reason seems to be the action itself. Hirsch’s photographic, video, and sculptural works are always centered on people laboring: carrying, digging, hoisting, and sweating. The challenge is indeed absurd and the solution awkward, but the participants' action is real, and is characterized by manual labor carried out with the aid of obsolete low-tech means.

Nardeen Srouji opens the windows and introduces a storm into the museum. The wind reveals historical layers of the building, inaugurated in 1930 as a girls' school of the Anglican Church, which was open to girls from all religious groups in the city, and its language of instruction was predominantly Arabic. Performing a series of interventions in the space, Srouji digs into the place’s past, uncovering echoes from the British Mandate period in the form of a tower of chairs about to collapse, texts in Arabic, and the sound of footsteps in the stairwell. The colorful past bursts forth through the gray concrete floor, springing up between the cracks that opened in white museum pedestals.

Wind is a gust of air that can be felt, but not seen. According to the Jewish Sages, King David's lyre hung opposite the north window in his bedroom, and when a north wind blew in, the lyre would play by itself. A north wind can be an air movement coming from the north, and it can also be all the tangible and intangible things that the north represents.

Extending over an entire floor, the exhibition is dedicated to a wide survey of video works by world-renowned artist Adrian Paci, starting with his earliest work from 1997 and concluding with two world premieres of his recent works from 2021. Paci is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary artists, who over two decades has been sensitively commenting on current political and social upheavals, while maintaining a unique humanistic voice. His art focuses on the individual, on singular human beings living within a collective, whose voices, facial expressions, and bodily movements are explored in his videos as in portraiture. From a close examination of specific people and unique situations, Paci zooms out to reflect on universal concepts and feelings such as loss and the struggle to overcome it.

With a deep fondness for eccentric men and women, Anna Lukashevsky wanders in the vicinity of her Hadar studio in Haifa, "hunting" types on the street: people who fit into clear ethnic and social characteristics, but something unique in their personality deviates from the "type" and captures her gaze. When she encounters an interesting figure, she makes a quick drawing on the spot and then invites that person to her studio; there, during several sessions, while conversing with the sitter, she paints and extracts a multi-dimensional individual from the ethnic-social category.

Centered on photographic portraits, the exhibition brings two artists together, separated by a hundred years—Volkan Kızıltunç and August Sander. The subjects of the portraits look directly at the camera, but rather than momentary, one-sided gazes, these are long observations between the photographers and photographed. The gaze is a means of dialogue between two subjects, who acknowledge the other's subjectivity while looking at each other. Where the photographers and their subjects looked at one another, a bond of gaze is now formed between the viewer and the work of art.

Aviva Uri's ability to touch on raw emotion, and the intense expressive quality typifying her work, have made her a highly influential, mythical figure in the history of art in Israel. The exhibition presents an outstanding selection of Uri's works, all from the collection of Haifa Museum of Art.

The exhibition is centered on The Open Receptacle—a significant gift recently received at Haifa Museum of Art. In this work, one may discern Berman Kadim's transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional work and his engagement with architecture. The structure of the receptacle is reminiscent of wooden Egyptian sarcophagi, and its proportions are based on the arithmetic ratio used in the design of the Parthenon floor—a Greek temple from the 5th century BCE in Athens, considered the epitome of classical architecture, whose floorplan is painted on the bottom of the receptacle.

Haifa Museum of Art, one of the first museums established in Israel, is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. A museum's material heritage is embodied in its collection, in the works it purchased and those donated to it. The works in the collection determine the museum's genetic code, and each new work entrusted for safekeeping joins its predecessors in shaping the museum's identity. This exhibition sets out to decipher the identity of Haifa Museum of Art by delving into its collections, asking where it is headed in the future.

The coronavirus crisis and its widespread effects have revealed the fragility of our existence in our most private spaces, as well as in the general social order. This is a period of fear and insecurity, yet also one of potential insight. It allows us to see through the cracks in the foundations of our existence and reexamine them, though the encounter may be distressful and shocking.