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.

The permanent exhibition showcases masterpieces from the Haifa Museum of Art's collection, which encompasses over 8,000 works, charting major trends in the history of local art. It spans works from the late 19th century to the present, where face and topography are mutually reflected, indicating affinities between the furrows of plowed earth and furrowed faces, between sun-scorched soil and tanned skin, between cracked asphalt and wounded flesh.

Many people living in Africa create power figures: hollow mannequins, which they fill with various materials, such as healing herbs or animal bones. In Africa, people believe that every material has energy that can have a positive influence on reality. So these power figures are charms providing protection against evil spirits, bad luck, and disease, and giving life-force to whoever holds them.

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.