Eldad Rafaeli

The current exhibition of works by Eldad Rafaeli (b. 1964) consists of three distinct bodies of work, which collectively present a single continuous, dynamic photographic enterprise, spanning two decades of intensive photography. The series are screened in quick succession, the photographs changing at regular intervals, in chronological order within each series. The soundtrack accompanying the projected images – beats on a large drum – is suggestive of heartbeats, ancient ceremonies, and the

Haimi Fenichel

Just a single letter distinguishes Haim Fenichel – who was killed in the 1967 War and received the IDF Chief of Staff’s Medal of Honor after his death – and his nephew, the sculptor Haimi Fenichel, born in 1972, who is named after him. The picture of the dead uncle – with the inscription Haim Fenichel RIP – gazed upon Haimi, throughout his childhood, during his weekly visits to his grandparents’ home. From there he embarked on a steady, ant-like journey that harks back to that childhood

Sharon Poliakine

One day, in 2012, bulldozers arrived in the open fields surrounding Sharon Poliakine’s residential neighborhood in the Israeli town of Ra’anana, and a new man-made landscape began to unfold. Anyone who witnessed the preparation works for the paving of Route 531, which runs across the Sharon region, will remember the dramatic and sudden change that this infrastructure project – one of the largest ever in the Greater Tel Aviv region – wrought upon the landscape. Poliakine monitored

Hadar Saifan

Israel exists in an unending sequence of national security crises and threats. The constant threat of missiles being fired into the country has turned civilian communities into potential combat zones. As a result of this volatile situation, communities are often required to evacuate their residents into bomb shelters. Most of these incidents have occurred during the long summer holiday: so it was with the Six Day War (June 1967); the First Lebanon War (June 1982); Operation Accountability in Lebanon

Nurit Yarden

In her “Homeland” project, Nurit Yarden seeks to examine the penetration of visual, social, and political signs into the Israeli public sphere. She invents a lexicon of sorts, yet it is not a standard one arranged alphabetically, in a seemingly objective manner, according to key terms, seeking to codify and determine that worth recording. In her “lexicon,” Yarden asks how to face the challenge of the fragile reality of a fragmentary present, one in constant flux, in a way that avoids the

Inward Gaze IV | Avraham Hay

After serving as a military photographer and working as a press photographer in the 1960s, Avraham Hay (b. 1944) studied in London photography of archeology, exhibitions, and works of art. Since returning to Israel, for the past five decades, he has focused on documenting diverse aspects of the local art field. The vast archive that has built up in Hay’s studio encompasses five decades of artistic, curatorial and museological work in Israel. He recounts that in his drive to document things,

Oded Balilty

After years of intensive work as a press photographer in the service of Associated Press (AP), which documents arenas of uprising, armed struggles, demonstrations and conflicts on a daily basis – for which he also won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2007 – Oded Balilty (b. 1979) found himself in the grip of a vague emotional block that prevented him from returning to these places. The works on display at the exhibition “Front” were shot entirely in the past two

Gaston Zvi Ickowicz

The “Whirlwind” project by Gaston Zvi Ickowicz (b. 1974) was created in a series of visits by the artist to the northern part of the “Gaza Envelope” area between March and October 2018. That period saw the beginning of a new stage in the struggle by the residents of the Gaza Strip against the Israeli siege of the area: tens of thousands of people took part in “marches of return” and demonstrations near the fence, in which Palestinian kites and balloons carrying flammable materials

Micha Ullman

At the heart of the installation by Micha Ullman (b. 1939) lies an architectural drawing of the ground floor of the artist’s house, which is situated not far from the museum, near the border between Ramat Hasharon and Herzliya. It is a modest, functional, two-family semi-detached house, of the sort that was prevalent in the area in the late 1940s. Today, the neighborhood is undergoing rapid development and construction, with new apartment blocks springing up around the

Scene of Events

The news bulletins and reactions in the various media in Israel to current affairs and to the emergency events that we are frequently confronted with present an endless flood of landscapes and places as the scenes of events and sites of terrorist attacks. The current group of exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art features nine solo exhibitions of artists who combine photography and sculptural installation in various ways, to deliver such examples of the scene of events to our