Exhibitions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Bible says: "Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain" (Proverbs, 31, 30). It seems our culture prefers to reject this ancient wisdom, preferring the lie and the deceptive outward appearance, as if it were the obvious choice. In this context, art historian Gideon Ofrat writes that "commercials never stop lying to us […] politicians never stop offering false promises before elections, in empty 'visions of peace'; public relations experts and spokesmen have become con-artists on retainers. Wherever we turn, whenever we open our eyes and our ears – lies surround us. It is as if we have accepted non-truth as the verdict of our existence."

Today's art world, in Israel and worldwide, evinces an increased interest in the intersection of art and social activism. Known as artivism, this new form of expression aspires to blend art and activism in equal degree. Contemporary art criticism emphasizes the power of art to function as an arena for political protest. Artistic activism, a new phenomenon that has become a staple of our time, is different from the type of critical art that dominated modernist discourse in the 20th century, as pointed out by curator and philosopher Boris Grois.

The new cluster of exhibitions presents eleven new exhibitions, five of them solo exhibitions and six group exhibitions. The exhibitions presents works by seventy Israeli and international artists. The current cluster of exhibitions deals with the vanishing boundary between the public and private spheres, exhibitionism, narcissism and voyeurism, which are some of the hottest topics of the twenty-first century.