Summer Exhibitions 2030 Art Museum, Ein Harod

Michael Kovner, "Dual Bus Mirrors" / Curator: Galia Bar Or
Maria Saleh Mahamid, "Tractate Life" / Curator: Yaniv Shapira
Eli Shamir: "Borders" / Curator: Yael Gilat
Orna Ben-Ami, "Life Bundle" / Curator: Yaniv Shapira
Hadha Kanishta / Curator: Deborah Lis

As of 15.6.2020

The five exhibitions that open at the Art Museum, Ein Harod, were designed even before the shaking of the Corona virus and were installed after it. Their visit illustrates the degree of timeliness and relevance of each of them beyond the fracture and trauma the company has undergone, and allows to learn about the healing power of good art, even beyond the moments of the moment. While each of the exhibits stands in its own right, the latent and visible threads that link to them can be discerned - such as dealing with biographical roots, close living environments, a look at physical and mental landscapes, conflicts and memories.


Michael Kovner, "Dual Bus Mirrors" / Curator: Galia Bar Or

In the exhibition and accompanying book, "Ezekiel," Michael Kovner embarks on a complex, personal and collective journey that combines reality and fantasy with a bio-fictional story centered on a character named Ezekiel, whose portrait is the same as his father's portrait, Abba Kovner. In the structure of an exhibit that combines comic, sound, video and text, he creates a rich and complex picture play, interspersed with intergenerational dialogue: a conversation with his father, who was a ghetto fighter, leader, partisan and Holocaust survivor, poet and kibbutz member, a conversation that never took place.
Michael Kovner floods a multidisciplinary, contemporary and sweeping work, family relationships and the dilemma of a fateful, life-and-death dilemma, for which there will be no answer and no consolation. He looks into contemporary, moral and political dilemmas, in the background of ghetto landscapes, in the Vilnius forests and in the background of pastoral landscapes of kibbutz.

Maria Saleh Mahamid, Vineyard / Curator: Yaniv Shapira

Maria Saleh's work of Hamid is based on a process of introspection, which in its search for meaning, vitality and value for life. This is also the case in this exhibition, which is presented to the viewer as a life mask, in which her characters are drawn and mapped as a visual diary of emotions, thoughts and longings. Saleh Mahamid's works derive their content from traditions of her father's house, born in Umm al-Fahm and her mother's home, born in Kiev, Ukraine; In it are references and associations of the pattern of her native landscape and the realities of her life, and they lead to times and places, to reality and imagination. It is a panoramic installation made all at once, without any preparation or planning outline, as a drawing of action that is evident in the physical and spiritual presence of her body, legs and fingers. Hence his possible reading is both linear and circular. The three sections deal with the themes of 'conflict', 'life and death', 'moment and eternity' and are interwoven with quotes and sources of art history.

Eli Shamir: "Borders" / Curator: Yael Gilat

Two solo exhibitions by Eli Shamir, under the name "The Borders of the Look," are on display at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod. The collaboration between the museums seeks to illuminate different faces in the artist's work through a thematic division: the exhibition "Portrait Time" at the Herzliya Museum focuses on portraiture, and that in the Art Center, Ein Harod deals with the boundaries of landscape and border landscapes. In practice, these are working bodies that are created in parallel, and often even intertwined, such as a portrait planted in the landscape, or a landscape that shows an identity pattern. The two exhibitions together encompass the entire work of the artist.
The "Borders" exhibition presents for the first time a multi-year move in the work of Shamir, a picturesque exploration that deals with fanatical appropriation and catastrophe of the landscape through myth, which transforms the landscape into a land attached to a bill of ownership. Shamir presents the landscape and its boundaries as a construction, which is always a partial picture that depends on a point of view. He formulates a complex, poetic and critical attitude towards the landscape, and his way towards local history and its representations throughout Israeli art history. Instead of an all-encompassing panorama that claims the totalitarianism of the gaze, its landscapes are constructed as a fabric of looks and seek to linger at the border. Thus is born the option of aesthetic and ethical existence, which impacts on our perception of physical, sensory, interpersonal and political space.
The exhibition, which includes large-scale oil paintings, quick site sketches and reconstruction of a video installation presented at the Tel Hai Art Contemporary Meetings 1994, is an invitation to a journey towards the boundaries of the perspective and to reflect on perspectives and views of familiar landscapes, drawing attention to the ways in which they are applied. Draw your eye towards the horizon. We are invited to trace the male hubris in paintings such as a self-portrait from the sky and a self-portrait paints a landscape, or to discover the light, dryness, haze and dazzling local, thinking of the unattainable longing to be like Europe. The painting is repeated as a symbolic element that places a physical boundary and suspends the appropriation of the painting. It is precisely in its "failure" that art is revealed as an act of compassion and recognition of boundaries.

Orna Ben-Ami, "Life Bundle" / Curator: Yaniv Shapira

Orna Ben-Ami's exhibition "Tzur Chaim" brings together several of the series of works she has created over the past decade, focusing on personal memory and collective memory; In emissions and wandering; Brick and absence; In parting and tearing and ultimately in the power of all these to stimulate the taste of life, the imperative in life. She said she wanted to describe a situation whereby "all being and support are movable. The packages hold the person, the people torn, without support and place, and hold only what they have taken from their home." She does this by sculpting iron, welding objects and figures, and combining them into photographs. The 'tree-lined' installation that fills the main avenue of the Tabernacle brings the viewer into a world that is full and empty at the same time. These are a kind of tree drawings in space, with no foliage and no roots, that are not saving or comforting. Inanimate bodies whose essence of sculptural purpose is in the representation of empty and absent. From the same 'Naked Forest', the exhibition opens to its additional axes: 'Life in the Packaging' series, 'Transparent' and 'Shadows' which together combine a vibrant experience, both physically and visually.
The lexicon of Ben-Ami's images and symbols is welded with sensitivity, urgency and precision, as if she had no choice. True to Gershom Shalom's statement, "Symbols are born and raised from the fertile ground of human feeling," she gathers them out of the realm of consciousness, casting light beacons on a single object, body posture, or faded image, holding a memory to the brink of amnesia. In doing so, it requires us to confront the disturbing topicality of her work, in pointing out the emissions, nomadic and emigration as the product of the unimaginable, unbearable and unacceptable human photographer, of every human being.

Hadha Kanishta / Curator: Deborah Lis

The exhibition "Hada Kanishta" presents works from the collections of the Tabernacle, alongside some works by contemporary artists. The name of the exhibition is taken from Aramaic: "Kanishta" is a church, or assembly, and the Talmud uses the word to denote a synagogue. Kabbalistic sources identify the term "Hadha Kanishta" with the ideal of redemption. When myriad believers are gathered together ("shar"), when they identify with each other and Arabs really and truly, as they move away from any company, bigotry and slander, they become a powerful force that can bring about positive change and form into a united entity, "sharply as a woman."
The Corona epidemic caused an unprecedented crisis, leading to the closure of synagogues all over the world for the first time in a long time. This unique distress inspired new ideas and raised new questions about the need for sacred space. We ask you to join us and explore the multidimensional meaning of the various objects presented here, and encourage you to discover the connections between you and others. We hope you find this show the connection to your tradition and your personal story.