New group exhibition at Haifa Museums • "Shared Criticism"

Artists and craftsmen present the products of their community-artistic project in a variety of mediums.

The Haifa Museums' Incubator for Art Place program for 2024 has reached its completion. On February 12.2.25, 6, a new group exhibition, entitled "Shared Criticality," will open in the incubator building, adjacent to the Haifa Museum of Art, which will feature 7 artistic projects created by XNUMX artists and an artist in collaboration with various communities.

2024 was a challenging year in every way, with war on several fronts at once. Nevertheless, the artists of the incubator managed to meet the communities and create. The artworks in the exhibition present community-based collaborative actions carried out by the artists in extraordinary spaces such as evacuated hotels and an abandoned and bombed city, squares, a studio in the village of Yanoeh, archives and private apartments. The artists held a dialogue with different groups of people, participation and presence were the material for creation and part of the work process.

According to Oz Zaluf, curator of the Incubator for Local Art:

The artists in the incubator this past year created ambitious projects that demonstrate attention to social gaps, to silenced experiences, and to the stories of places, individuals, and groups that are far from the public eye. The war created an extraordinary challenge, both in terms of the ability to physically move around and meet with others, and in terms of the ability to engage in various content during a period of emotional survival and national upheaval. The exhibition includes important and interesting stories that find their place in artistic creation.

The artists who will be exhibiting in the exhibition:

Tal Gaash worked in Paris Square in Haifa, which functions as a living space for people who find themselves on the margins of society. She created an ongoing dialogue with them and the space, expressed in a sound installation that includes various recordings that express mental and spatial processes.

Michal Lapid conducts an ongoing dialogue with the evacuee community of the Shlomi settlement, where she grew up, in hotels in Haifa and Jerusalem. She works in relation to the abandoned and derelict settlement, the destroyed houses and the people who chose to stay or return. She exhibits fallen parts, a mechanical sculpture whose parts she collected with residents from their bombed-out homes, and more. Faina Feigin Landau conducts research that includes a discourse and collection of testimonies about the Haifa caravan site where she grew up, which disappeared from Israeli consciousness as a significant and formative experience in the process of absorbing immigrants to the country. She resurrects it through animation and the construction of a community-based archive that was dispersed to her and collected by her during the research process.

Nani Brooke presents a theatrical performance in the exhibition that includes monologues by professional and amateur artists about shared foreign experiences rooted in the participants' self-identity. Hani Khatib performs a participatory sculptural process with an unusual raw material: olive oil soap, a material representative of local indigenous culture and a material associated with his mother's home, which used to make soap from leftover olive oil. Khatib guided and taught groups of Jewish and Druze women to sculpt and work with the material. The women chose to embed fabric textures in it that echo their mothers.

Leila Abd al-Zarrak and Dana Ziv document conversations with young men and women from Arab society about experiences of foreignness, shame, and rejection. The conversations are processed and composed into sound works that deal with the status of the Arabic language as an expression of social status. The artists participating in the project received a unique training program, coaching sessions with a mentor from the Israeli art field, curatorial and production support, a marketing system for their work, and unique scholarships with the assistance of the Edmond de Rothschild Center and the Haifa-Boston Partnership.

According to Yotam Yakir, CEO of Haifa Museums:

The Makom Art Incubator has already become a flagship program of Haifa Museums, bringing to Haifa culture impressive and rare work by artists with and within Haifa communities. I thank from the bottom of my heart our partners: the Edmond de Rothschild Center and the Haifa-Boston Partnership, who make the incubator possible, thanks to their generous support.