Exhibitions

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.

Artist Jaro Varga came from Prague to Haifa three times during the last year, visits which he spent tracing the footsteps of famous Germans and German culture in the city. A past visitor who attracted him in particular was author Karl May, who came to Haifa in 1899.

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?
In the absence of other answers, the main reason seems to be the action itself. Hirsch’s photographic, video, and sculptural works are always centered on people laboring: carrying, digging, hoisting, and sweating. The challenge is indeed absurd and the solution awkward, but the participants' action is real, and is characterized by manual labor carried out with the aid of obsolete low-tech means.

Imagine a train ride across a pristine landscape. There is no building, no factory, not even a road in sight. Nothing. Just hills and sand. Through the train window it seems like a place untouched by human hands, but this is obviously an illusion. If we were to stand in the landscape and look towards the train, we would see that the landscape is scarred with iron tracks. Our environment is nearly always shaped by people, who add their own touch to nature, and there is almost no place that is truly natural. But what if humans and nature could live together in better harmony?
You are welcome to design the mountain yourself: plant trees on its slopes and peek into the secrets it reveals through the windows hanging above. Join the ride through the designed landscape to observe it from the inside out and from the outside in.

In essence, printmaking generates images that are based on transference: transference from one surface to another. In fact, one of the first creative activities with which children experiment is printing, when they dip their hands in paint and leave their imprint on paper. Over the years, the art of printmaking has become more sophisticated, and the prints on view attest to the wealth of possibilities inherent in the field.

Noga Etzioni Yudkovik engages in sculpture and drawing. Her studio functions as a factory, where she works with woodworking machines, lathes, and various tools, in materials such as oak-tag, cork, and rubber—cheap materials that instill an ascetic feel. In a laborious process, she concocts, takes apart, and reassembles from these diverse materials objects that seem to have been made of wood. Ostensibly heaped at random, these objects are the result of careful planning, during which the artist examines the interrelations between the sculpted parts, and between the sculptures and the space, in a practice that combines sculpture and architecture.The works are distinguished by a perception of interpersonal dialogue as an artistic quality. Domestic kitchens, public institutions, the threshold to the street—all of these function as scenes of action and studio spaces where the works are created. Presence is the main creative material and the foremost value in this artistic genre, which pushes aside art that aims for visibility in favor of art that seeks to be experienced while taking shape.

The exhibition focuses primarily on early 20th century prints by German artists, all from the museum's collection. Its title was borrowed from the Sturm und Drang movement - a literary movement in 18th-century Germany, emphasizing expression of the individual's deepest and most intense feelings on the assumption that the human psyche is dominated not by reason but by raw, stormy, and unexpected emotion.