Weekly Highlights in Jerusalem’s Contemporary Art Scene
Gallery Talk: Strangeness
The Israel Museum debut of actress and artist Raida Adon (born 1972), displaying her new video work Strangeness – an epic and poetic work addressing identity, refugees, and the yearning for a home. This narrative is comprised of powerful and dream-like images and is set in a location that is at once surreal and yet rooted in the local landscape. Strangeness evokes conflicting emotions of fragility and stability, wandering and permanence, as Adon shifts between her personal and collective identities, both Palestinian and Israeli. This work makes an important statement with a powerful urgency, transcending the local and the political and striving for the universal and human. Gallery Talk in Hebrew with curator Amitai Mendelsohn Wednesday February 28, 12:00 at the Israel Museum, Rupin Blvd. 11. Must have an entrance ticket to the museum. For more info, click here.
Exhibition Closing: Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov
Join Artspace gallery for the closing event of Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov’s solo exhibition, which features an eclectic selection of works by the artist. Born in the U.S. in 1961, Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov has lived in Israel for most of her life. Painting is a lifetime commitment, a source of inspiration and a continual challenge, according to the artist. Observation of reality keeps Kestenbaum Ben-Dov focused, providing a foundation for journeys exploring multilevel identities, histories, and even languages, with text playing a role in many of the artist’s works. Exhibition Closing Thursday February 27th, 17:00-19:00 at Artspace Gallery, HaZefira St. 5. For more info, click here.
Exhibition Closing: Bikurim
Bikkurim, in its second edition, is a bi-annual project aimed at encouraging the activity of young artists in Jerusalem. Unique among its kind in Israel, the project is supported by The New Gallery and features work by eight art school graduates living and working in Jerusalem, whose lives are essentially tied to the city. The intent and purpose of the exhibition is to constitute a professional platform and provide exposure to these young artists. Exhibition Closing and gallery talk with the artists and curator, Sally Haftel Naveh Friday February 28, 12:00 at New Gallery Teddy Stadium, Gate 22. For more info, click here.
Exhibition Opening: Smoking
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. 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. Exhibition Opening Saturday, February 29th, 12;00 at Jerusalem Artists House, Shmuel HaNaggid St. 12. For more info, click here.
Exhibition Opening: The Black Book
As part of research for an exhibition at the Freud Museum, London, artist Gideon Rubin purchased online old newspapers and magazines from the late 1930s, 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 as a weekly serial. 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. The Black Bookwas first exhibited at the Freud Museum, London in 2018. Its presentation in a new format at the Jerusalem Artists’ House has different, symbolic overtones. Exhibition Opening Saturday, February 29th, 12;00 at Jerusalem Artists House, Shmuel HaNaggid St. 12. For more info, click here.
Exhibition Opening: Armpit Garden
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. 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. Exhibition Opening: Saturday, February 29th, 12;00 at Jerusalem Artists House, Shmuel HaNaggid St. 12. For more info, click here.
Contemporary Art in Jerusalem 