Exhibitions

The collections of Dr. Yirmiyahu Rimon (born in Haifa, 1933-2018), constituting one of the largest and most important private collections on the history of Palestine and Zionism, are the product of decades of enthusiastic and diligent collectorship. They bring to mind Walter Benjamin's definition, in an essay on collecting (in The Flaneur), of the collector as a courageous rebel, collecting objects not for their utilitarian value but rather according to their beauty and the memories they evoke.

This exhibition was created following the acquisition of the Rimon Collection by the Haifa Museums – a step that introduced a large private collection into the museum space. The exhibition addresses the tension between the "private collection" and the "museum collection" in the diverse

With reference to such "Cabinets of Wonder" and to the artistic-curatorial discourse that has developed in recent decades in Israel and abroad, we sought to examine the inventory of the Haifa Museums' storage rooms with a fresh gaze. We searched out the wonderful, the exotic, the amusing. In the exhibition hall we stacked objects and works arbitrarily – lacking any "class-based" hierarchy, with no commitment to chronological-historical organization or to the representation of a meta-narrative.