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.

Over the past year, Chen Cohen photographed her medical routine in various clinics and at the Bnei Zion Medical Center in Haifa. She focused on the medical instruments and her encounters with the medical staff—meetings intended to treat the body, which were full of tenderness and compassion, healing the soul, too. She did not document the treatments from a seemingly objective position, or one that emphasizes the difficulty of being the object of a medical examination, but rather performed for the camera. She came to the check-ups as a healing shaman, always dressed in the same long black dress, which is contrasted with the white space. The camera she installed in the clinic transformed the event into an artistic act addressing beauty and love.

The works presented in these two exhibitions are the result of activities carried out over the past year by three artists of the "Space for Community Art." This program at the Haifa Museums encourages artistic practice that is attentive to the place and the local community, initiating processes in the city's neighborhoods, which reinforce art's social power and increase the public need for art. As part of this program, artists based in the greater Haifa area, selected by a professional committee, receive close curatorial support as well as conceptual and practical training for artistic action in the community. Community members participating in the project play a substantial part in the artistic process.

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.

Our body works all the time, even at night, when we sleep: the heart beats and pumps blood to all parts of the body, the lungs fill with air and empty, and there are many other systems in the body that work nonstop so that we feel well. These actions produce heat, which is known as "body heat."
Panels painted in shades of red and blue hang along the wall. They were painted with a special paint sensitive to heat, which disappears in contact with the skin. Try touching the panels and see how your body heat affects the paint.

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.