Exhibition & Projects
Distant Lights - Netta Laufer
Winner of the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist, 2022 Netta Laufer looks at animals. As a child, she observed the many animals she raised, studied biology, and eagerly read National Geographic magazines. As a photography student, she learned about the history of nature photography – primarily American landscape photography – and of the critical turn in the second half of the 20th century. Scholars and cultural critics began questioning the perception of nature as “natural” and exposing the various forces – political, institutional and social – that dominate and shape it. This could be described as a shift from “landscape” to “territory” – a place to control and possess, where some are free to roam, whereas others are forbidden entry. Even the seemingly beneficial act of protecting and preserving nature poses the question of which nature deserves protection and from whom. Photography and photographic apparatuses are integral to these acts – from 19th-century Romantic representations of nature to documentation, surveillance and monitoring.
Curiosity, patience, and a keen critical eye drive Laufer as she surveys the conflicted Israeli territory, approaches physical borders and charts transparent ones. She settles in and around fences and walls, cemeteries, nature reserves, forests, and archeological sites, ready to capture the presence of animals who share these places with humans. Her works shed light on how they are affected by human presence in their habitats and how they adapt or challenge it. Laufer uses various photographic means, such as security cameras, motion-activated trail cameras, drones, and thermal cameras that allow night photography and recall civil, scientific, and military uses. A fox, jackal, gazelle, hyena, partridge, and porcupine briefly appear in her works. At times, they may react to the camera and look into the lens, but for the most part, they are indifferent and wander about looking for food or moving from one place to another. Perhaps in a moment, they will either prey on something or be preyed upon themselves.
https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/netta-laufer-distant-lights/
Sand Wall - Vera Vladimirsky
Winner of the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist, 2021 Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984, Ukraine, immigrated to Israel in 1991) depicts in her work a journey in search of identity as a new immigrant to Israel. Her photographs combine documentation, memory, yearning and fiction, and through them she composes a new narrative that examines the concept of “home.” Vladimirsky’s work process is layered: direct photographs that become collage, montage and photographic installations in space, which she then photographs again, with an emphasis on natural local lighting and breaking down the image’s internal space. Her aesthetic choices are reminiscent of early 20th-century avant-garde trends. They offer a viewing experience that brings together an intercultural encounter of past and present, here and there, through space and aesthetics, the architectural and the public, against a domestic and personal background. The exhibition features four series, two of which were produced especially for the exhibition.
https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/vera-vladimirsky-sand-wall/
Ira Eduardovna - The Iron Road
In her two-channel video, The Iron Road (2021), Ira Eduardovna revisits the night in which her family left Uzbekistan on its way to Israel, focusing on her memories as a ten-year-old girl from the farewell at the train station, which marked the beginning of a long journey.
The artist reconstructs the train cabin from memory, returning her family to it. She directs and shoots the scene, telling them about what awaits them in the coming years. The sorrow of parting and the fear of the unknown are reflected in another, parallel channel, comprising black-and-white still photographs, which capture the facial expressions of the participants in the drama. Through spectacular and complex use of the photographic and cinematic mediums, the installation explores the elusiveness of memory and time and the unrelenting pains of immigration.
https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/ira-eduardovna-iron-road/
Shai Ignatz - Goldi
Shai Ignatz's exhibition, Goldi, spanning twenty years of intense photographic practice in stills and video, this comprehensive show—Ignatz's first museum exhibition—features a wide range of works, from his beginnings in the art world as a student to the present, including many works making their public debut.
Ignatz first came into public notice with the formative series Independence Park shot in Tel Aviv in 2000, addressing issues pertaining to identity and gender, social detachment and solitude. He was among the first photographers in Israel to place homosexual figures at the center of their work, thus paving the way for many artists after him. He has since created many important photographic series, including WIZO Women, Monsieur Léri, and Shaul, which have accumulated into a substantial body of work. Alongside the photographs, the exhibition features video works exploring the relationship between photographer and subject.
Ignatz's oeuvre is centered on portraits, but the circumstances of their creation in his work and the nature of the encounter between the photographer and his sitters transform this genre into a charged arena: Ignatz contacts his subjects online, in gay dating sites, or randomly through acquaintances, so that his first encounter with the model occurs in front of the camera. It is usually a one-time session, injecting a dimension of uncertainty. Most of the subjects are photographed in their homes, in their private space. Ignatz has developed a unique personal language: direct photography, in broad daylight, based on a relationship between photographer and sitter occurring at a given place and time. He photographs people who differ from each other in age, ethnicity, gender, and geographical location, exposing the ravages of time on their faces and bodies, and presenting them in their physical and mental nakedness, with the camera serving as both a pretext for the session and a shield.
https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/shai-ignatz-goldi/
Looking For a Village - Efrat Hakimi
Efrat Hakimi (born in 1982) takes the viewers of her exhibition on a fictional and documentary wandering. Her starting point is the disappearance of the village of Assamer in the High Atlas Mountains. The village was abandoned by its Jewish residents, and can’t be found on contemporary maps. The exhibition tells the story of the immigration to Israel of the village’s inhabitants, including Hakimi’s family.
In the absence of a family archive, Hakimi looked in public archives for documentation and testimony about a place that no longer exists. Her search leads her to ever-widening circles, with the personal story and the wider story becoming interwoven, taking in the political conditions of the period, including an important moment in the history of Moroccan photography. The exhibition moves in space and time, from the courtyard of the Sultan of Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth century to a village in the High Atlas, and travels to Israel by sea on the ship ‘Jerusalem’ in the middle of the 1950s, reaching the moshav of Shokeda in southern Israel. Hakimi creates an imperfect and fragmented biographical-geographical path, in which gaps in feminine and personal historiographies are slowly and gently revealed.
Hakimi examines the possibilities that arise from a wide range of photographic practices: straight photography contrasted with staged photography, moving images contrasted with stills photography, black & white photography contrasted with color photography, and more. These are not documentary works. They activate images, photographs and objects from the past in inventive ways, in order to tell a new story. In this way, the photographic relic from the past is made personal and relevant.
https://tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/efrat-hakimi-looking-village/
Alex Levac - Flâneur
Alex Levac has left quite an imprint on Israeli society over the past half-century or so. More to the point, he informed the way we view ourselves through his insightful candid shots of everyday life here. That gift and the quality of his photographic oeuvre have not escaped the attention of the folks over at Google Arts and Culture. The application and online platform contains images of tens of thousands of artworks stored at over 3,000 cultural repositories across the world, including the Israel Museum and the White House. The new solo show goes by the name of Flaneur, which derives from a term adopted by Jewish German philosopher Walter Benjamin to describe a person who roams city streets with no clear purpose other than to observe urban life. The exhibition is a first-time collaboration between Google Arts and Culture and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and was compiled by the former curator of photography at the museum, Raz Samira. All told, there are 22 works in the virtual spread dating from 1986-2022. The shots were snapped all over the country on Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem, Ramallah, the Gan Hashlosha resort and Nahal Oz, as well as right on the Tel Aviv Museum’s front porch. How to interact with the exhibition The interactive exhibition allows us to wend our way through the display areas of the virtual museum, and enjoy the works in full-screen display views. Some of the pictures come with commentary by Levac himself who provides anecdotal and informational backdrops. “The camera is my means of expression,” Levac states. “I see myself as a researcher, as a small-time historian, a collector of testimonies in the Israeli living space. I am a sort of anthropologist, observer, documenter – all these, by means of the camera, are proof of what exists and what existed here.” The matchup between Levac and Google Arts and Culture was initiated by Moriah Royz, a product manager Google’s Crisis Response team. Serendipity played its part in the project.
https://artsandculture.google.com/pocketgallery/ZwWRYKqNwPYpZQ
Photography Under Fire
THE TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART MARKS ONE YEAR SINCE THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE
Throughout the week of February 19, 2023, at the Tel Aviv Museum in collaboration with the ZAZ10TS cultural initiative in New York will screen the war photographs of photojournalist and representative of "Polaris Images", The photos will be projected on the facade of the Paulson Family Foundation Building and at the entrance to the Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and at the same time on our ZAZ Corner Billboard on the corner of 41st Street and & 7th Ave, revealing shocking scenes from the horrors of the war.
Throughout the week of February 19, 2023, the Tel-Aviv Museum, in collaboration with the Charney Resolution Center in Tel-Aviv and the ZAZ10TS cultural initiative in New York will screen the war photographs of photojournalist and representative of "Polaris Images", Ziv Koren. The photos will be projected on the facade of the Paulson Family Foundation Building and at the entrance to the Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and at the same time in New York City on giant screens in Times Square on the corner of 41st Street and & 7th Ave, revealing shocking scenes from the horrors of the war.
On the day of Februrary 19th, 2023, the Tel-Aviv Museum will hold an open evening for the public, with the participation of leading media professionals and photojournalists from Israel who documented the war and uplifted both civil and military voices throughout the past year. Among them will be Yediot Ahronoth journalist Ronen Bergman, staff writer for The New York Times; journalist Itai Engel ("Uvda", Channel 12), and Neta Livneh, editor-in-chief of Yediot Ahronoth. Throughout the year, the Tel-Aviv Museum will hold activities for refugees from Ukraine who are currently in Israel, and will send creative kits to Ukraine through the Early Starters organization, which deals with educational-therapeutic activities for young children in emergency and extreme situations.
