Exhibitions

Merav Sudaey's exhibition space was transformed into a cave with painted walls, a ritual site for an ancient goddess. She draws inspiration from wall paintings in Hindu and Buddhist temples and monasteries, replacing all the figures with the image of one woman, her own. This painterly installation thus consists of a stratified series of self-portraits in which Sudaey examines her naked body as an object for painting while looking into herself as a subject. Applying diluted paint to the canvas, she heaps transparent layers one atop the other, which conceal or reveal spectral underlayers of female nudity. The two-dimensional canvas is rendered three-dimensional, as it were, as additional painterly worlds are waiting to be discovered under the top layer of paint.

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.

Equipped with white overalls, compassion and courage, Liron Hana Ohayon and Amit Gavish lead an interdisciplinary artistic act in the streets of Haifa. They gathered six women who recently moved to Haifa for a joint creative process, which included a confession and a statement of identity aimed at pushing the boundaries of involvement in the space. The six video works on view are elaborations of six acts of female healing, whose gist is coping together with personal passions and fears.

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.

Collage is an important technique in art. It allows you to connect different worlds and create things that only exist in the imagination. To create a collage, you cut images from different sources, take them apart, and then put the pieces together in a new, surprising way. The odder the cuts and links, the more striking the resulting new creation.

Wadi - is a hydrologic geological formation, and a term in Arabic, Hebrew, and English describing different forms of seasonal flow, associated with areas with little precipitation.
In Haifa, however, a wadi is also a mental state; the city's wadis are used for momentary respites from the routine, for various games, and for alternative community gatherings. At the same time, they also embed darkness, all sorts of waste, and complex ecosystems of flora and fauna, which exist in a world parallel to everyday life.
The exhibition addresses different manifestations of this alternate universe.

The exhibition juxtaposes three works by international artists delving into the universal characteristics of the gestures of the protesting body, with four series of photographs from four significant protests in local history.

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?
The pulse and breathing rates are among the vital signs by which physicians determine whether a person is healthy, sick, or dead. The vital signs are directly affected by one's emotional state: they change in moments of calm or excitement, fear or infatuation. The exhibition features some of the real products of these vital signs in works of art from the past twenty years. Lines, lights, and sounds are generated as the work of art is adapted to the heartbeats and the cycle of inhalation-exhalation, which determine the structure of the work. This rhythm—whether calm and regular, fast and fidgety, or completely still—may guide one into the depths of consciousness. Alternatively, it can make us conscious of those who are bleeding or those who have been deprived of air to breathe.

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.