Exhibitions

The Haifa Museum of Art collection, which provides the foundation for this exhibition, reveals a very different 1970s: years of richly colored oil painting, whose forms are grounded in the visible place. The artists whose works are featured here all observed the local landscape closely, rendering it while applying the lessons of contemporaneous international art. They demonstrate a profound internalization of these tendencies that sought to reduce artistic expression to uniform color surfaces and abstract, universal forms, while infusing it with local content and conceptualizing the very essence of the landscape.

The exhibition emerged from a collaboration between Laila Abd Elrazaq and Dana Mazal Ziv—a video artist and a composer—who, within the framework of the Haifa Museums' Space for Community Art Incubator, invited Arabic speakers from various local communities to reflect on their relationships with language. Excerpts from the interviews are played in the intimate listening booths, accompanied by textual video works in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, which shift between translation of the uttered words and their distortion, visually illustrating how the multiplicity of languages ​​is sometimes experienced as a disturbance. Interview fragments were rendered as choral compositions, which envelop the space.

Moshe Roas's work intuitively fuses diverse, seemingly incongruent materials into a sculptural creation that finds points of equilibrium between weights and textures, between above and below, giving rise to a new material and visual conceptual world. Following a sustained engagement with the Museum's collection of objects from Morocco, characterized by a fusion of grandeur and mysticism, Roas was reminded of artisans of the past, of traditions of sculptural craftsmanship, and of the labor and precision invested in spectacular ornamentation that seeks to master matter and touch the sublime.

Whether a valuable artifact or a simple piece of cloth, an object is a container of life, carrying the memory of the body that wore it and the hands that crafted it. The physical aspect is present in every object in the exhibition, and all the works on view were made for the human body. For the first time in over 40 years, the exhibition reveals the treasures of the material culture of Moroccan Jews held in the museum, most of which were given to the Haifa Museum of Ethnology between 1950 and 1970 by immigrants from Morocco, mainly accomplished seamstresses and tailors.

The permanent exhibition showcases masterpieces from the Haifa Museum of Art's collection, which encompasses over 8,000 works, charting major trends in the history of local art. It spans works from the late 19th century to the present, where face and topography are mutually reflected, indicating affinities between the furrows of plowed earth and furrowed faces, between sun-scorched soil and tanned skin, between cracked asphalt and wounded flesh.

The Museum's collection of African ethnographic artifacts, which has remained hidden from public view for 30 years, includes approximately 1,000 pieces, donated by avid collectors and dedicated donors from around the world, who have intensely explored specific cultures and regions of Africa. These works were once exhibited at the Haifa Museum of Ethnology, founded in the early 1950s and active on Arlozorov Street until 1995. In unveiling these works again, "Africa Calling" calls on its viewers to immerse themselves in the diverse and vibrant cultures of Africa.