In his first solo show in Israel, Joel Mesler juxtaposes Jewish concepts and typography with his distinctive LA-inspired aesthetic, contemplating the state of Jewishness in the diaspora with a brush dipped in humor and nostalgia.

Spiritual Healing, To Life, Home Run – Joel Mesler juxtaposes Jewish concepts and typography with his distinctive LA-inspired aesthetic, transforming the Jewish experience into bold, whimsical statements. In The Light Within, Mesler’s first solo show in Israel, the artist paints his way through memories and identities, contemplating the state of Jewishness in the diaspora with a brush dipped in humor and nostalgia. October 7 further strengthened Mesler’s desire to celebrate his heritage, even in the face of the global art scene’s antagonism towards his support of Jews and Israelis.

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Relationships between people define, shape, and sometimes completely transform us. But what about a relationship in which not all parties are human? Our relationship with the city we live in, for example? And what kinds of actions – small or large – shape the encounter between the residents of a city and the place they inhabit?

The exhibition “Street Level” presents nineteen new works by artists active in Tel Aviv-Yafo and unfolds throughout the museum – from the upper floors to the courtyard.

This is the museum’s annual art exhibition, part of its rotating program that invites creators from the city to develop works specifically around a changing theme.

Just as the term “sea level” refers to the meeting point between land and sea, “street level” explores the point of contact between the city and its residents. What are the conditions of this encounter? What are the terms of this gaze?

What is required of us to see the city – and what is required of the city to look back at us?

The works in the exhibition offer a range of materials, emotions, perspectives, and visual languages – from the poetic to the political, from the personal to the collective.

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Hila Krabelnikov Paz documents moments and scenes from the religious-national society in which she grew up. Krabelnikov Paz touches on subtle, less talked-about gender issues, such as religious society’s expectations of women and their status in the religious establishment.

She documents fleeting moments from her personal life. She uses simple, disposable materials, such as masking tape, wallpaper, stickers, posters, and pashkvils. The exhibition will also feature a number of free-form embroidery works. The two techniques she uses: masking tape gluing and embroidery, are based on laborious handcrafts – embroidery is associated with women, and the gluing process is reminiscent of “masculine” industrial materials. Both crafts do not allow for mixing colors, and through the Sisyphean and meticulous work of choosing the color of the material, she manages to create an illusion of depth, light, and shadow, simulating brushstrokes in an impressionistic style. The exhibition will feature recent works, combined with new works she created especially for the exhibition that incorporate details from objects from the Pavilion’s collection for Jewish Culture and Folklore, such as women’s head coverings from the 18th-19th centuries.

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Jewish and Local Clothing from the Museum Collection

The exhibition presents a unique photographic project by international photographer Vangelis Kiris (born and working in Greece), who was commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Culture and Folklore to photograph the magnificent costume collection of the Pavilion for Jewish Culture and Folklore . Kiris photographed approximately eighty male and female models wearing items from the collection, which is one of the most important of its kind in Israel.

The collection includes full costumes, items of clothing, headdresses, jewelry, and tallit, from the 18th–20th centuries, originating from Jewish communities around the world: Bukhara, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Poland, Turkey, the Balkans, and countries in Western Europe. Kiris’ dramatic portrait photographs are printed on large cotton fabrics onto which he embroiders selected and delicate details of gold, fine metals, and cotton, recreating ancient embroidery traditions.

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In this installation, Nadia Adina Rose weaves her two worlds, sculpture and poetry, into one work for the first time. She explores the elusive and deceptive nature of verbal language and opens up new possibilities for the visual reading of her poetry, thus seeking to observe the ambivalence inherent in the connection between language and the imaginary world it represents.    

Right at the beginning of the exhibition, Rose plays with the paradox inherent in these relationships and frees the viewer-reader to move through the open spaces of language through the unexpected contexts she weaves. A mysterious silhouette calligraphy unfolds on scroll-like canvases hanging in space, while the verses of her poem, “Because,” projected onto them, appear and disappear alternately. The word “Because,” which opens each line of the poem, seems to rely on the existence of a logical structure of cause and effect, but its continuation unravels the bonds of the understood and the known. Beyond the screen, a surprising sight is revealed, continuing the movement toward the absurd. Rows upon rows of sewn branches emerge from the walls of the space, some naked and others sprouting meaningless calligraphic characters. They recall vegetation, unknown writing marks, and perhaps birds, flighty assumptions. Their shadows, spread out like a forest of bookmarks on the walls, invite a renewed look at language and writing as a human attempt to domesticate the wild and unknown reality, to impose order on chaos, and to create the illusion of knowledge.

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The creative process for this exhibition began with a sketchy dialogue that Ruthie Helwitz Cohen had with the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the renowned Indian poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature. While reading his book Sadhana , which deals with the training of the spirit, the artist wrote a pictorial response on the text with a ballpoint pen.

In her work, Halivitz Cohen responds to books of thought and poetry and to sources, an ongoing process from which a variety of painting, sculpture, video and sound installations emerged. This work was inspired by Tagore’s book, Fireflies , which contains short verses of poetry, which were for her like sparks shining from the darkness, and ignited in her a desire to walk a long way with him and listen to his voice, to his voice. The book also bears a personal dedication; Halivitz Cohen received it from her partner, after it was inherited from her father, and later their son Nadav composed the sounds that play in the exhibition space, inspired by it.

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Orientations combines Daniel Kiczales’s (b. 1980) various practices—composition, video, and sound—with a multi-participant performative act. Created during the current war year, the work is a visual, vocal, and lingual journey of two choirs moving through the landscape at this time. The role division between the choirs is intentionally simplistic and predominantly gender-based: one consists of twelve women of different ages, producing pre-lingual sounds while traveling in a taxi van on bumpy roads. The jolts of the ride affect the production of the voice and countenance. The rough road becomes a major instrument on the musical and expressive levels, when observation is directed inward, into the crowded space of the vehicle. The women’s choir is affected by a terrain yet unmarked, unpaved, unsettled, and unmapped. The bumpy road becomes a musical score of tremors, rhythmic textures, and leaps, which are an integral part of singing based on loss of control; singing that sometimes sounds like crying or lamentation, at other times like a hysterical, possessed chant, and at yet others like stuttering or garbled speech. The resulting experience is one of disorientation, as the viewers have no idea where they are or where they are headed. The situation is tantamount to blindness or getting lost.

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In the installation The Garden, one eighth of an acre—the gallery’s total area—has been transformed into a plot full of knolls, trees, and bushes (some gathered in nature, others made of plastic and silk). Visitors are invited to wander among the paths illuminated by nocturnal light, where the sounds of nature can be heard.

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For the first time, it features her large-scale installations, showcasing the wide array of materials employed in her work, all drawn from the fabric of life itself: a wall-mounted piece made of raw sheep’s wool, stretching from floor to ceiling; a stack of traditional blankets and a tangled system of vein-like tubes, through which olive oil flows like lifeblood; and a video of a mother blessing her daughter with repeated words in a meditative rhythm. The diversity of materials is complemented by distinctive techniques, primarily characterized by manual labor and the duplication of a basic form or object. Together, these elements amplify the sense of pain and defiance against the cycles of coercion imposed on Abu-Hussein as a woman, a Palestinian, and an artist in a traditional, patriarchal society.

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This exhibition presents still images of Israel from 1960 captured by the Frenchman Chris Marker, one of the postwar New Wave’s most original and influential directors. Photographed from Eilat in the south up to Kibbutz Manara in northernmost Israel, they were taken in preparation for a new type of documentary film about the young country. The film, Description of a Struggle, achieved renown – but the photographs vanished. A few years ago, more than 1,000 negatives from this project were discovered in the archive of the French Cinematheque; some 120 of them have been printed for the exhibition and are displayed here for the first time. Images of everyday scenes and ordinary people, they convey the same insightful humanism that Marker brought to his film.

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