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.

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.

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.