calendario eventi  :: 

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8/2/2012

Nine exhibitions

Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach Tikva

Art - Society - Community

Curator: Drorit Gur Arie

In recent decades, more and more artists around the world have been involved in artistic-communal activity which blurs the boundaries between art and life, encouraging discourse and social activism. This tendency is manifested, among others, in extra-institutional initiatives, independent and collective organizations of artists, combining artistic practice with social and political involvement, mainly in the periphery.
The cluster of exhibitions Art–Society–Community strives to shed light on various models of social involvement, through a range of projects by Israeli and international artists who operate within disempowered and excluded communities in different cultural and geographical regions. All these diverse practices of social-artistic activity are characterized by giving, breaking the traditional boundaries between artwork and audience, enhancing the interaction and dialogue between art and community, and expanding the notion of the "artistic space," as each project brings problems, unique to the specific community in its historical, political, and economic contexts, to the fore. Some of the projects in this cluster present initiatives by artists active in their peripheral native communities, whose members take part in artistic acts, architectural tributes, and educational enrichment which contribute to the sense of community and local pride. Other artists engage in cross-continent social-artistic activism. Their activity is usually held in the public space, in which they intervene, leaving traces in the field in order to catalyze the residents to act and assimilate a change of consciousness. From this point of departure on the line between art and life, vision and practice, the projects oscillate between the local and the global, challenging art's place in the array of forces underpinning urban, cultural, social, and political processes. Ultimately, all these undertakings aim at levering these processes and moving them toward healing and rehabilitation, possibly "tikkun."

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Ofakim, Yosef-Joseph Dadoune


In the past twelve years, Yosef-Joseph Dadoune's work has emerged from and alluded to his childhood town of Ofakim. He makes films, collects archival materials, initiates guided tours, invites journalists, and tries to harness as many people as possible to deliver Ofakim from its status as a "non-place." The product of "social engineering," Ofakim is one of the instant towns that emerged in the area during the state's nascent days, a city in which wages are still among the lowest in the country. Dadoune's work is a one-artist guerilla commando, leaving documented marks in the field. At the same time, it is also a carefully planned strategy which intervenes in the communal everyday, while interweaving the local occurrence within the networks of the hegemonic center by exposing the ongoings in Ofakim to influential parties.

Launched in Ofakim, to which he returned in 2008, Dadoune's In the Desert project is an ongoing act in multiple channels, including artistic practice and initiation of pedagogical and enrichment programs for youth; the jewel in the crown is the Of-Ar Project, designed to promote the transformation of the deserted, monumental textile factory which collapsed in 1988, into a new type of community space, reusing the building without destroying or renovating it—in collaboration with local entrepreneur Yitzhak Krispel, Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, and Dan Hasson. The "cultural hothouse" to be erected on site leaves the building as is, a multipurpose culture compound and a platform for unique relations between culture, leisure, employment, and business, based on recognition of the ability of art and architecture to influence social life. The renewed Of-Ar (if and when implemented) would form an architectural icon for the city of Ofakim, a flag-project which will enable its citizens to take an active part in cultural activity and contribute to the dynamic shaping of Israeli society.

Through critical scrutiny of the products of the Zionist melting pot, Dadoune's activism endeavors to introduce a different social-cultural agenda. As part of a comprehensive program to empower youth and enhance their sense of belonging to the place, Dadoune worked with a group of youngsters in diverse enrichment workshops. Some of the participants were even cast as actors in the video Ofakim (2010). The film begins with the youth standing in "freeze" positions inside the Of-Ar factory, as if they were standing at attention in memory of its running days. It continues with a Sisyphean procession which invokes the cooperative spirit prevalent in the early days of settlement, while at the same time triggering military hazing.

In the film In the Desert (2009), Dadoune buries the identifying landmarks of the Zionist enterprise of "conquering the wilderness"—a palm tree and a cypress tree—in the ground. With bitter irony, he thereby alludes to the burial of the settlers who were cast to the frontier regions in the name of the "cloak of concrete and cement" vision and became pioneers against their will, a-priori ascribed to the social margins. In the series of films Horizon Fragments (2009), Ofakim is revealed as a ghost town where time has frozen. The orphaned deserted interiors of the Of-Ar factory are joined by the corpse of the only cinema in town—echoing the occupational and cultural void of Ofakim, which still awaits new life to be breathed into the material cobweb covering it.

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Infinite Earth, Alona Harpaz & Mika Rottenberg

Alona Harpaz and Mika Rottenberg’s installation-model acquired its title from the name of a non-profit rganization (Infinite Earth) established by the two artists in Berlin in 2008, intended to aid needy mmunities by supporting education, setting up employment centers, and training women and children in andicrafts. The artists raise funds by selling photographs in limited editions—”by-products” of small model-works inspired by Third World landscapes which they create. The revenues from these “by- roducts” are directed to India and Africa—e.g. to supporting a weaving center in the village of Chamba in Northern India, owned and managed by a local women’s organization, or to an educational program for homeless sick children in Namibia. During the run of the exhibition, the artists will conduct a workshop in community empowerment at a center for girls in Petach Tikva.

Unlike the previous projects (Infinite 1 and Infinite 2), implemented on a small scale, the installation nfinite Earth functions as a “visitors’ center” for the viewers’ enjoyment. A fantasy about art and play, it esembles a titanic board game or a touristy miniature park consisting of the four elements—air, fire, earth, and water. The game pattern projects, for instance, on the rehabilitation of the weaving factory, ntroducing the potential for repeating a work of art, which is then sold, activating the cycle of existence nd livelihood as in a food chain; the energy reservoirs are drawn from the earth and return to it, just like all the other artistic-economic “give-and-take” resources in the project-game created by Harpaz and ottenberg. The installation will be offered for sale during the exhibition to promote additional such ojects.

The quasi-natural (bodies of water, a mine) or “child-like” (sandbox) objects in the installation spawn a icrocosm, a mental landscape which does not represent a real place, yet draws inspiration from the eographical and cultural scenery of East Asia. The artistic vision is imbued with values of giving and eceiving, activating a web of movement and change which, in turn, leads to a renewed distribution of resources aware of the need to save energy and preserve the environment. As a whole comprised of ountless representations and fragments of reality, the installation is typified by flux and cyclicality of hings which penetrate one another, sustain one another, depend on one another, setting one another in
motion. This reciprocity is linked to one of the insights at the core of the Buddhist world view—a world hose entire elements, reflections, and phenomena forever exist in a mutual interdependence, and where verything is in a constant state of otion, flux, and change. This “cyclicality” seeks a human ractice nderlain by oundless responsibility for others and for one’s surroundings; one whose echoes re discernible in the installation, which sweeps the viewer into a prevailing game truth.

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El Cerro, Chemi Rosado Seijo

Puerto Rican artist Chemi Rosado Seijo creates mainly artistic interventions pertaining to a place or a community and their history, generally via communal work. Such is also the project whose documentation is presented in theexhibition: a type of social archive of artistic acts performed on the “canvas ofthe everyday,” joining contemporary art discourse, social activism, and traditional culture with architecture and landscape.

Located on a hillside south of San Juan, El Cerro consists of slum districts with a poor, negative socioeconomic image. Its dwellings, which were constructed without a plan, began to appear in the 19th century. They were intended to house workers from the local coffee plantations, and are still occupied by their descendants. Striving to change the image of the village, Rosado, in collaboration with social workers, artists, and volunteers, harnessed the members of the community to paint the façades of over one hundred houses in diverse shades of green. A color associated with the Puerto Rican Independence Party, it made them assimilate in the local landscape and topography as if they were an integral part of the indigenous flora. His act began with visits to the residents’ home, presenting sketches and asking to join the painting initiative. The inhabitants initially suspicious and apprehensive responses were soon replaced by enthusiasm and thrill for the opportunity to take part in the giant “painting
.”
This environmental artwork—in homage to the spontaneous-popular architecture which evolved locally—proved itself to be highly influential with the interpersonal relationships in the community, contributing to bringing neighbors together and boosting the sense of belonging and local pride. Artists Raimond Chaves and Pablo León de la Barra operated in the village concurrent with Rosado Seijo. The former
printed a local street newspaper (which he suspended on clothes lines), and the latter staged a local museum whose artifacts were collected from villagers’ homes.The monumental “mural” of the village painted green became a tourist attraction.
The interview courtesy of Creative Time

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There is Nothing There, Katerina Šedá

Czech artist Katerina Šedá regards her work as “social art.” She is not interested in the gallery or useum space, but in the work with people in an attempt to bring them together into a community. In her rojects, in which she explores and highlights social patterns under lab conditions, she activates the articipants in a type of game, which contributes to confrontation of the loss of identity and sense of lienation in an ever-changing contemporary society. The Czech word šedá means gray, a color which as become a hallmark of her work. Šedá gathers “gray” people, who do not stand out in their own right, and ctivates them, thereby striving to change their lives and shed a new light on gray.

Šedá’s largest project, whose documentation is presented in the exhibition, is a social game she reated for the inhabitants of three sequestered Czech villages, which culminated in a Saturday activity in the village of Ponetovice (in May 2003). For an entire year, the artist observed and analyzed daily life in hese villages, only to learn that their occupants often complain “there is nothing there”: no basic services
such as post office, health care, or a site for social gatherings. A questionnaire she distributed asking bout living habits in these villages revealed that the inhabitants spend most of their weekends keeping up a monotonous routine.

In light of her findings, Šedá set out to enhance community life via an activity which unifies forces to reate a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Everyday life is granted a unique power when every imple act is undertaken by all village people simultaneously. The residents were recruited to perform a daily regime of activities” following a long process which entailed house calls, advertisements, and public meetings. The program-game was based on a strict timetable, from getting the morning paper, hrough shopping, airing and cleaning the house, bike riding along the village paths, and a fixed lunch, to meeting in the local pub,
watching the news, and turning off the lights—all at prescribed times. The social research resulted in an xciting experience, enabling each resident to take part in a collective experience and realize the power nherent to the little things in life. Nothing compares to the illumination afforded by the discovery of the reviously invisible.

The interview was prepared for the group exhibition of the 21 shortlisted artists of the 2010 Future eneration Art Prize, PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Ukrai

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Nomansland, Self-Broadcasting Council & Muslala group

Follow the journey of Nomansland Council at www.thebproject.org

The Muslala group brings artists and social activists together, most of them residents of Jerusalem's Musrara neighborhood and the adjacent "seam" area at the foot of the Old City, which was a "no man's land" between 1949 and 1967. This charged area was also the habitat where the Israeli Black Panther movement emerged, and it serves as a microcosm for the multiple layers of this intricate city: the Old City walls; secular, ultra-Orthodox, and Arab residential neighborhoods, poor and affluent; the light rail tracks and the highway crossing Jerusalem from south to north. The members of the group strive to introduce social change through diverse modes of expression—some publicized, others as acts of a "commando guerilla" or a coded intervention in the social sphere. The group organizes ritual acts, performances, and guided tours, installs art on the city streets, and has even planted a communal garden and set up a workshop for neighborhood residents. Another branch of activity is the Self-Broadcasting Authority—a broadcasting body located in a mobile caravan, initiated by Guy Briller, one of the group's leaders. The Authority makes journeys and holds meetings with cultural figures and random audiences, which are documented and broadcast in real time, without the mediation of the artistic establishment.

The Nomansland project consists of three journey chapters, two of which took place in Jerusalem during 2011. The third will be made during the show; it will start in Petach Tikva, and extend to additional cities in the course of a week, while being transmitted via an improvised "broadcasting station" set up inside the Museum. The three journey chapters outline the image of a territory devoid of clear identity, the backyard of the visible and explicit, a no man's land—a term which conceals a double negation: negation of the ownership over the space and negation of man's sovereign status. This twofold detachment articulates the complex nature of this arena in particular and Israeli space in general.

In their action Nomansland, the group members adopt the travelogue genre, which enables the introduction of artistic practice into the public sphere on the seam separating art from life. The journey serves as a catalyst for breaking out of the box of traditional perception amounting to movement between the studio and the institutional exhibition space, while expanding the artistic act and its impact on society.

The first journey in the trilogy—Measurements and Observation (March 2011)—was held in Briller's mobile caravan/studio in the parking lot of the Musrara neighborhood, with the participation of artists from different fields: performers, visual artists, dancers, architects, musicians, and intellectuals. The interdisciplinary act within and in reference to a defined area transformed into a discussion of a space's ability to embrace differences and multi-culturalism. It was broadcast from the caravan/studio to a website, which also included edited video clips from the field, texts, photographs and GPS coordinates. The second chapter—Visit Nomansland (October-November 2011)—challenged the limits of linear time and perception via works and actions which disrupted order and logic, breached boundaries and laws, and shattered ethos and myth. Testimonials from these acts are screened in the control room on the left, among them: a guided tour in the light rail stations, which transforms routine travel into a journey of redemption relating to the phenomenon known as the "Jerusalem Syndrome"; a subversive installation of a street sign for "They-Are-Not-Nice Alley" (alluding to Golda Meir's assertion about the Black Panthers); or an illusive patrol of a white soldier whose visibility and identity are blurred.

As opposed to the previous two chapters, which focused on the Musrara neighborhood, the current chapter, to be carried by Briller and Yuval Yairi, broadens the range of significations introduced by the notion of "nomansland" to utopian political and cultural contexts. In fact, it is a work in progress, which will begin on the exhibition's opening night on the hill across from the museum, on the ruins of the partially destroyed dining hall of Kibbutz Givat Hashlosha. From there the journey will head toward other sites, and will be documented by live broadcast from the "control center" in the Museum alongside documentation of previous journeys. This combination of spaces—cybernetic, museum, and physical—is aimed at increasing the range of expression and influence of the project as a whole.

Artists & Guests:
Homesick (Iris Erez, Asaf Aharonson, Ofir Yudilevitch, Tami Lebovits), Noa Arad-Yairi, Yael Balaban, Ittai Binnun, Yuda Braun, Amnon Barri & Netanel Goldberg, Guy Briller, Gavri Guy, TaaPet, Mich’ael Zupraner, Lavi Zytner, Zvi Tolkovski, Yuval Yairi, Matan Israeli, Noam Kuzar, Irit Manor, Porat Salomon, Adi Sened, Heading (Emilie Combet & Asaf Aharonson), Snir Kazir, Chaya Rukin, Chen Shapira, Amit Hevroni, Ayala Landau, Zali Gurevitch, Coco Deri, Sara Vaknin, Jonathan Pelleg, Jonathan Plitman, Adam Miklaf, Ram Mizrahi
Photographers:
Snir Kazir, Yuval Yairi, Guy Briller, Lee Friedman, Mich’ael Zupraner, Shmulik Twig, Nave Antopolsky, Matan Pinkas, Danielle Zini, Yaniv Yur, Shlomit Yaakov, Yoav Bezaleli, Matan Israeli
Video editing: Guy Briller
Display construction: Edward Amiga

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The Film Class, Uri Rosenwaks

The community of black Bedouins ("Afro-Bedouins") in the desert town of Rahat faces racial and class discrimination deeply rooted in the social conventions of the traditional Bedouin community in the Negev. The black Bedouins' roots lie in East Africa, where they were captured by Arab slave traders and sold in the markets of Zanzibar and Saudi Arabia to white Bedouin tribes. These markets operated until the early 20th century; many of those abducted and their offspring continued to serve as slaves in Palestine until 1948 (when Israeli law came into force), hence they are still referred to as "abed" or "abda" (Arabic for slave, servant). It is a minority that has endured deprivation and oppression. Their negative image pervades the local social, family, and education systems, preventing their personal as well as professional advancement and limiting their independence and freedom of choice.

The Film Class was created in Rahat in 2005-06 as part of a filmmaking workshop for black Bedouin women taught by director Uri Rosenwaks. While working with these women, teaching them the principles of cinematography, their daily confrontation with the harsh racism and the repressed historical origins of their discrimination are unveiled. As part of their course work, the women documented their activity through the instruction and in collaboration with Rosenwaks and his colleague, Magid Kamalat (director of the Step Forward NGO in Rahat). They gathered information, researched, filmed, and interviewed family members, the community elders, and representatives of the public. During the work on the film, the women even travelled on a roots journey to Africa, a quest whose documentation—as well as its exposure to the public at large and the Bedouin community in particular—became a scathing, seminal document about the persistence of customs and prejudice regarding skin color and country of origin. Concurrently, it was also a personal pilgrimage for each woman and an empowering voyage that influenced their status in the community with the aid of the visual tool.

The film received first prize in the Israeli Documentary Film competition (2007), and participated in many festivals the world over. Following its success, funds were raised to purchase professional equipment to expand the film class in Rahat.

Produced with the support of
The New Foundation for Cinema & TV
Channel 10, Israel
Step Forward for the Promotion of Education in Rahat

The Negev Foundation for Co-Existence

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Flood
Curator: Irit Carmon Popper

"Flood," the third in the series of exhibitions "Continuum: Installations following the Collection," continues its practice of inviting pairs of artists to create intertextual tributes in the form of site-specific installations which observe and incorporate works from the Museum's collection (as a point of departure and a source of inspiration). Peleg Dishon's spatial installation in the gallery converses with Talila Ben Porat's work Jerusalem (1976); next to it, in the foyer of the Yad Labanim Museum, is a ceiling installation created by Ra'anan Harlap facing Mordechai Gumpel's mosaic wall With One Hand Laboured on the Work (1965-66).
The title of the exhibition draws on the metaphoric denotation of "flood" as profusion and excessive multiplicity, referring to an act of inundation, gush or drift, in this case—an inundation of viewpoints, perspectives, and perceptions. This notion invokes the "theory of the Derivé" introduced by Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1950s, essentially centered on "transient passage through varied ambiences" to create an alternative geography, a wandering which brings to the surface the psychological order hidden beneath the explicit order of the city. The Situationists' proposed architecture is based on constant interference with orientation and a new perception of space.1 In this sense, "flood" refers to intervention in the Euclidean spatial perception in the exhibition and its replacement with a simultaneity of viewpoints, which displaces the perspectival vanishing point in favor of a discussion of the feasibility of new spaces.2 The installations created by Dishon and Harlap expose a multiplicity of viewing modes and perceptions of reality vis-à-vis the accelerated technological development and the changes in the perception of space-time today. The limited (even false) nature of the gaze is reinforced against dimensions beyond the grasp of the human eye.
Ra'anan Harlap's ceiling installation consists of readymade materials (planks, leftover construction material), which together form structures reminiscent of Tetris blocks. The blocks are generated by various combinations of four identical squares of the type which, during the eponymous computer game, drop from the top of the screen so as to thereby fill a row at the bottom. The game is based on three-dimensional solid geometry which undergoes two-dimensional flattening in its transition to the screen—and that is the condition that makes it possible, for only in two-dimensional form can the shapes be placed in a single row. Enhancement of the planeness and the objects' flattening, alongside the abstraction involved, entails a change in spatial perception and a rearrangement of the territory, when the dimensions of the physical space collapse and "disappear" on the computer screen.3 Harlap extracts these blocks from the abstracting cybernetic trap, furnishing them with a renewed physical presence, although with perspectival distortion—a type of optical shift manifested in the object's morphology. In this context, it is interesting to mention anamorphoses, a distortion of an image familiar from Hans Holbein's well-known painting, The Ambassadors (1533)—a phenomenon which captures the viewer split between two gazes, frontal and lateral, where each observation post necessarily contains a loss of the image, and with it—an undermining of the viewer's autonomous sovereignity.4
The installation is placed on the ceiling as an elongated, twisted concentration of mass gradually dispersing from within itself, calling to mind an object caught in a black hole in which time is slowed, converting its mass into kinetic energy.5 The cyclical movement sweeps the blocks in directions which deviate from the vertical-horizontal axis customary in the game, making the viewer feel as though he is pulled inside from the entrance door to the foyer, reinforcing the perception of the place as a passage which, by definition, demands swift movement. The amorphous, cyclical movement reinstates the object with the characteristics of natural flood, which are inverse to the static and constructivist qualities of the mosaic decorating the foyer walls; in their materiality and shape, the wooden blocks are actually congruent with and continue the structurality of the mosaic wall and the image featured in it.
Peleg Dishon's spatial installation manifests architectural elements of a basilica: an elongated nave, flanked by aisles and an apse at the end—the area of the sacred altar. The aisles contain the suspended plates of Talila Ben Porat's double diptych Jerusalem opposite a landscape created by Dishon as a paper cutout which oscillates between map and model, with four screens simulating an act of scanning situated behind it. The "apse," as befitting its significance, contains a monumental projection of the scans—enlarged views of the map-landscape's verso, its invisible back side—a projection which generates an illusion of space despite its being flat and impenetrable whether by the sight lines or by the viewer. In this projected space of visual collapse, interior becomes exterior (surface), blurring the differences between near and distant, real and imaginary, three-dimensional and two-dimensional.
The paper cutout results from combination of multiple different landscape images inspired by the wood work to which the artist chose to relate, and from his visual and mental impressions of the city of Jerusalem and its images. For their presentation, Dishon uses a multi-layered construction of multiplicity to create a type of augmented reality which does not masquerade as a unified unit. Among the images one may identify Bruegel's Tower of Babel, an ancient map of the celestial Jerusalem, depictions of cities and castles by Dürer and Böhm, the cover of the LP record "Relayer" by Yes. The upper border of the landscape was borrowed from the skyline of the Jerusalem hills in Ben Porat's work—evolving-dynamic landscapes consisting of excerpts of architecture and nature repeated densely, almost obsessively, in a manner reminiscent of art brut. The spatial totality created by Dishon is marked by a different type of spatial movement, one which blends real and utopian architectural structures regardless of their historical-geographic location, with wriggly resilient psychogeographical wandering routes flowing between them, flooding the landscape. Cut and folded, these routes are absent spaces, empty like black holes, whose significance lies, paradoxically, in the light passing through them, connecting the static map parts.
Dishon's invented landscape juxtaposes panoramic and geological views, distant and close-up, external and internal. This simultaneity produces a gaze which hangs by a thread on the verge of collapsing; the inversion of the gaze and interference with the ground position eliminate the dimension of depth. The spatial disorientation occurs when the viewer moves simultaneously between a broad linear gaze and an inquisitive close-up, in an attempt to follow the occurrence of a lateral, cyclic, or flowing movement from top to bottom; between an overview and a concentration on detail; between surface and interior. As in the New Babylon of Situationist architect and painter Constant Nieuwenhuys—a utopian project which called for an atmosphere-dependent architecture requiring the mobility of structures and spaces—Dishon assembles and deconstructs places, periods, and styles to produce a new Jerusalemite space, virtual and utopian, underpinned by stratification and flux between spaces and times.
"Jerusalem" as a concept and a construction, as a point of departure and a source of inspiration, is gauged in the exhibition as a case study—a stratified city whose radical multiplicity of (cultural and archaeological) layers distinguishes it from other cities, but at the same time—projects on them. It is in this conceptualization that Jerusalem bursts forth in the ceiling installation, when the shadow of the Tetris blocks projects on the mosaic figures busy building the wall of Jerusalem from the period of Nehemiah as a pile of orphaned geometrical forms awaiting their utopian realization.

Notes
1. See Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive (1958), in Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (eds.), Theory of the dérive and other situationist writings on the city (Barcelona: Museo d'Art Contemporani, 1996); Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998).
2. Scholar and architect Rem Koolhaas uses these terms to describe the "New Urbanism" in a space which is not based on order, but rather on uncertainty; which no longer aims for stable configurations, but rather refuses their crystallization; no longer obsessed with the boundaries of the city and its architectural contours, but with manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications; see Rem Koolhaas, "Whatever Happened to Urbanism?", in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 958-971.
3. See: Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991); Dror K. Levi, "The Big Aphanisis: From Time to Space and Vice Versa," History and Theory, 4 (March 2007), on-line magazine of the History and Theory Unit, Bezalel Academy of
Art and Design [Hebrew]; for an English synopsis see: http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/en/1173510036/dror_en.
4. See Ruth Ronen, "The Picture: A Trap for the Gaze," Art and Its Discontents (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010), p. 90 [Hebrew].
5. See Avi Rosen, "Art at the Event Horizon," trans. Sonia Dantziger (the Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University, 2005), http://www.transmediale.de/en/node/5219.

Peleg Dishon, Flood, 2012, site-specific spatial installation, mixed media
Talila Ben Porat, Jerusalem, 1976, scorched and painted wood, four plates, 168x122 cm each, in memory of Yaacov Sammet
Ra'anan Harlap, Flood, 2012, site-specific ceiling installation, wood
Mordechai Gumpel, With One Hand Laboured on the Work, 1965-66, mosaic walls, Yad Labanim Museum, Petach Tikva

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Ongoing Project: The Journey
Curator: Ami Steinitz, Associate curator: Danny Admasu

Curator Ami Steinitz presents a process of cultural activism. He has chosen to take the museum utdoors, to the street, thereby inverting its role. As part of the project (called “The Journey”), ten stories reflecting the history, culture, and reality of the Ethiopian community in Petach Tikva were selected.
Signs were installed in ten spots throughout the city, inviting passersby to dial on their cell phones and listen to these stories. In order to implement the project, a team including municipality representatives, activists, and local Ethiopian artists, and artists from the Petach Tikva Museum of Art Education Department was set up. Steinitz himself regards all the project participants as associate “curators.”

This project reflects Steinitz’s current curatorial concept as the outcome of an ongoing process. In 1996 he began staging exhibitions created in collaboration with young people from the Ethiopian community. After many years of extensive activity in the Israeli art milieu, in 2001 Steinitz decided to close his gallery in Neve Tsedek, Tel Aviv. This stemmed from the realization of the limited nature of the gallery space and the desire to place topmost importance on direct involvement in socio-cultural processes. Believing that one should not focus, as customary, on the art exhibit, Steinitz developed a process of “wall-less curatorship,” as he calls it—a social approach striving to create a direct affinity between the museum and the life of the community in the urban sphere.

Image: Alona Harpaz & Mika Rottenberg

Petach Tikva Museum of Art
museum complex Yad Labanim
30 arlozorov St. pob 1, Petach Tikva 49100, Israel
Opening hours
mon. wed. fri. sat.: 10:00-14:00
tue. thu.: 16:00-20:00

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