Current Exhibitions

The encounter between the human and the mechanized and coded is at the heart of Ofri Lifshitz’s exhibition, alongside the tension between technology and its products. This encounter is manifested in the combination between the artist’s love for craft and matter, and reality in which the lines between man, machine, and digital media become increasingly blurred.

The process began with the development of a machine operated by digital code, whose algorithm was programmed to make it simulate a process parallel to making ceramic dishes by hand. The code enables a broad range of machine movements, so that in the manufacturing process, each plate is

created as a one-of-a-kind piece.

For this current research (3.0) Lifshitz opted for ceramic ware, products of the industrial world, from various factories worldwide (Rosenthal, Wedgwood, Herend, IKEA, and Villeroy & Boch(. Their reproduction by the machine and its operating algorithm infuses them with a new interpretation, eliciting questions: What will the language of craft look like in tomorrow’s world, and what will the new meaning of art and design be in the post-industrial age?

By means of cutting, fragmentation, and layering, Abraham Kritzman alludes to various gathering, wandering, and hiking experiences he had in 2015 in Piatra Neamț, a city in the Moldavia region of Romania, where his great-grandfather lived years back. During his journey, Kritzman follows the evolution of various myths that carry cultural and ideological baggage. Architectural arches and vaults alongside peeled frescos come together to form new images that function as a visual façade for “mythic rifts”—transient fractures in the historical continuum, which strive to highlight the fluid, imaginary nature of our reality. These allusions elicit thoughts about situations in which the gathering of information and the multiplicity of data create camouflage and screening, while generating new stratified images that echo our relation to such notions as memory, experience, and interpretation.

 The exhibition assembles myriad depictions, a blend of forms, and a sequence of visual and experiential references to form a two-space, multi-layered installation, introducing questions regarding their recurrence, preservation, and place along the historical continuum.

As part of research for an exhibition at the Freud Museum, London, artist Gideon Rubin purchased old newspapers and magazines from the late 1930s online, relating to the period of Freud’s escape from Vienna to London. In one of the parcels he was shocked to discover a 1939 magazine containing an English translation of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, published in the UK in 1939 as a weekly serial. As opposed to the exclusively textual book, the magazine format contained illustrations, paintings, and photographs from Nazi Germany and the world over (including Tel Aviv), and royalties from all sales went to the British Red Cross Society, as noted on the cover.

Following the initial shock, Rubin decided to purchase the entire 18-magazine edition. Via Sisyphean, daily work, which began as a personal emotional act, he erased every word in the text with black paint, and altered and/or erased all the accompanying images. In his typical style, Rubin manipulated the photographic images by masking the figures’ faces and obliterating Nazi propaganda symbols.

The methodical blackening yielded a series of abstract, monochromatic works, which introduce a symbolic act of neutralization: “rewriting” the satanic book and transforming it into a black book.

The Black Book was first exhibited at the Freud Museum, London in 2018. Its presentation in a new format at the Jerusalem Artists’ House has different, symbolic overtones, reinforced by the history of the building, which previously housed the Bezalel Museum.

Sigmund Freud, a Jew without God

France 2019 | 90 min | French | Hebrew & English subtitles

Director: David Teboul

Producer: Richard Copans

Source: Les Films d’Ici, Paris

Voices: Isabelle Huppert (Anna Freud), Mathieu Amalric (Sigmund Freud)

French filmmaker, artist, and writer David Teboul unfolds the chronicles of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential figures in the 20th century, based on his personal letters. He uses archival footage and periodic photographs, which often resemble paintings, supplemented with narration, thereby animating the film and infusing it with a vocal aspect and additional depth. The use of all these to tell Freud’s life story yields a poetic masterpiece, at once historical and dramatic. The viewer is drawn into the lives of Sigmund Schlomo Freud and his daughter-successor Anna, and led through the major stations in Freud’s life: from his birth in the 19th century, through his childhood and acquaintance with the bible, where his love for the written word was kindled, to personal and historical events that shaped one of the greatest scholars of the human psyche, the unconscious, and dreams, as the tragedy of the Nazi rise to power gradually approaches in the background.

As early as the outbreak of World War I, Freud already realized that the world was changing, and not for the better. Despite his loyalty to Judaism, he refused to take part in the Zionist enterprise, preferring to remain a European. The film guides us to the 20th century, during which the theory of psychoanalysis developed, the same century in which millions of human beings were exterminated, thus juxtaposing good and evil, creation and annihilation.

Eyal Sasson’s exhibition “Armpit Garden” resembles a painterly installation, whose organs have been inflated to monumental dimensions and gone out of control. It consists of large-scale, raging, spilling, bleeding paintings that breach the boundaries of the quadrangular format, undermining the medium’s familiar boundaries. They come together to form a model of a disordered nature, an excessively flowering garden almost to the point of rotting, blended with fluid and fleshy bodily elements to create open-mouthed, carnivorous vegetal monsters. Sasson fashions surrealistic hybrids, crossing blown up elements, which he isolates from nature, with body parts and fluids. The result is physical and mental landscapes swarming with emissions or emanations of paint—tantamount to outbursts of foliage or inflorescence, or to some welling forth of a spring—eliciting thoughts about the body’s wear and disintegration.