Israel Museum 2016 Exhibition Highlights

February 17 – May 6, 2016 (Curated by Rita Kersting)

Benin-based artist Georges Adéagbo will create a site-specific installation for the Israel Museum’s Focus Gallery. A strong, distinctive voice in the contemporary art world since the mid-1990s, Adéagbo’s floor and wall installations present a complex network of concepts and associations that are reflected in materials he collected during extensive stays in Israel and Benin. Using his own texts, found objects, and books alongside paintings and sculptures created by his studio colleagues in Cotonou, Adéagbo constructs complex collages — termed by him as ‘Horizontal Archaeology’ — that explore how individuals interpret cultures and the history of a place based on their own experiences. For his installation at the Israel Museum, the artist traveled throughout Israel, merging findings from his trip with his own idiosyncratic narratives and visual associations.

March 4 – October 25, 2016 (Curated by Dr. Daphna Ben-Tor and Dr. Eran Arie)

Pharaoh in Canaan tells the highly revelatory and previously untold story of the rich cross-cultural ties between Egypt and Canaan during the second millennium BCE. The exhibition presents more than 680 objects demonstrating the cross-fertilization of ritual practices and aesthetic vocabularies between these two distinct ancient cultures. From large-scale royal victory steles and anthropoid coffins to scarabs and amulets, the exhibition features an array of archaeological artifacts discovered in Israel and Egypt —including many drawn from the Museum’s own collections that are paired with major loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Egyptian Museum in Turin, and other collections.

As companions to Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story, the Museum will present three concurrent exhibitions in Jewish Art and Life, European Art, and Israeli Art, examining Egypt’s cultural and aesthetic impact across the centuries. These include The Allure of the Sphinx Egypt in European Art (March 4 – October 25, 2016), The Second Exodus from Egypt: 1950–1960s (March 4 – October 25, 2016), and Yitzhak Danziger: Return to Canaanite Identity (May 22 – September 10, 2016).

April 20 – October 29, 2016 (Curated by Aya Miron)

This retrospective exhibition surveys more than four decades of creative output by the Israeli multi-disciplinary artist Efrat Natan, including his works from the early 1970s alongside new works that were not previously exhibited. Born in 1947 and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Rupin, Natan is one of the pioneers of conceptual and body art in Israel. Throughout her career, Natan has created a vocabulary of powerfully charged visual imagery that draws upon her own biography, the collective Israeli experience, and events in Israel today, as well as on Western and non-Western art historical traditions.

April 20 – October 29, 2016 (Curated by Rita Kersting)

This exhibition presents a selection of works that were recently acquired by the Museum and were crafted by some of today’s most creative practitioners, including Nina Canell, Jesse Darling, Petrit Halilaj, Lyle Ashton Harris, David Horwitz, Tala Madani, Roman Ondak, Seth Price, and Paloma Varga-Weisz. Exploring images of linkage and connection as well as of interruption and detachment in both material and conceptual manifestations, the exhibition takes its title from The Distance of the Day (2013), a video work by David Horwitz presented on two iPhone screens showing the rising and setting of the sun, which was filmed by the artist and his mother simultaneously on two sides of the globe.

May 25, 2016 – March 18, 2017 – Curated by Daniella Shalev

Thread, yarn, string, fiber, wire, cord, and rope — whether thin or thick, fine or coarse, natural or man-made, they share the ability to join things together. This year’s annual exhibition in the Ruth Youth Wing for Art Education highlights the essential role that connecting threads play in life today and throughout the centuries. Featuring contemporary and historical works drawn primarily from the Museum’s collections, the exhibition explores notions of connection, from biological and familial ties to social and technological connections in today’s increasingly wireless world.

June 2 – September 24, 2016 (Curated by Rita Kersting)

The most recent video work by acclaimed contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask (2014) — a mesmerizing and disconcerting 19-minute film — responds to a YouTube clip entitled Fuku-chan Monkey in wig, mask, works Restaurant!, depicting an actual incident in which a monkey, outfitted with the mask of a young girl, was trained to work as a waitress at a restaurant in Fukushima, Japan. Following the nuclear disaster in 2011, Huyghe used a drone camera to scale the site’s wreckage and to document scenes of the monkey alone in its habitat, silhouetted against a the restaurant’s dark and empty interior. In this dystopian setting, the monkey acts out the human condition as she endlessly repeats her unconscious role, highlighting the artist’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between animals and humans.

July 1 – November 12, 2016 (Curated by Tanya Sirakovich)

Tracing Picasso’s artistic development, this extensive presentation features over 200 drawings and prints from the Israel Museum’s own holdings along with important loans from other museum collections. On view will be the complete production of Picasso’s Vollard Suite, which is considered one of the most important series of prints executed in the 20th century. This treasure reveals the artist’s developing interest in classical sculpture and includes 100 etchings realized by the artist between 1930–1937 for his dealer, Ambroise Vollard. The complete set of Suite 347, which is among the last hand-signed etchings Picasso ever created, will also be on view. Produced with rapid speed by the artist in Mougins, France, between March and October 1968, this set of 347 etchings reprises Picasso’s artistic autobiography. The collection is replete with references to art history and to the artist’s life’s work; all of which was merged together through Picasso’s signature stream-of-consciousness. Throughout the exhibition, paintings from the Museum’s own extensive holdings, together with important loans from The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée Picasso in Paris, will explain the chapters in Picasso’s unparalleled creative history.

July 1 – December 31, 2016- Curated and designed by Oren Sagiv

Exploring another dimension of European influence on the evolution of Israel’s modernist visual heritage, this exhibition examines the significant impact of early 20th-century European modernism on the architectural language of Palestine during the period of the British Mandate, which came to be known in Palestine as ‘White Architecture.’ Architecture in Palestine draws inspiration from the extensive research of Israel Prize laureate architect Ada Karmi-Melamede and architect Dan Price, whose accompanying book of the same title explores not only the tectonic and functional aspects of this new architecture, but also the relationships among values, place, and form that influenced the formation of this new language in a new land. The exhibition features documentary, analytical, and interpretive drawings — a practice Karmi-Melamede revived and developed counter to the trend of the computer age— that provide an alternative understanding of modern architecture as an evolving language, together with stunning archival photography of some of the iconic architectural projects of the time.

December 25, 2016 – March 5, 2017 (Curated by Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn)

This exhibition and accompanying research-based catalogue will investigate, for the very first time, the appearance of the figure of Jesus in Israeli art as a significant, multifaceted, and ever-present phenomenon and the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist pre-state, and Israeli artists toward Jesus. With artworks spanning the period from the second half of the 19th century through today, Jesus in Israeli Art will examine the complex dimensions of the image of Jesus throughout the history of Judaism and how it has become a critical presence in the story of Jewish and Israeli art. Showcasing the evolution of this symbolic presence, from signifying the persecution of Jews and their victimhood to personifying national resurrection, the exhibition shows the figure of Jesus as a central symbol in Israeli art and provides a new perspective on Israel’s artistic progression. Featured artists include Joshua Borkovsky, Marc Chagall, Maurycy Gottlieb, Moshe Gershuni, Sigalit Landau Ephraim Moses Lilien, Motti Mizrachi, Efrat Natan, Adi Nes, Abel Pann, Reuven Rubin, and Yigal Tumarkin.

December 22, 2015 – June 30, 2016 (Curated by David Mevorach and Rachel Caine-Kreinin)

The only three extant bronze portraits of the Emperor Hadrian (117 – 138 CE) will be brought together for a first-time display in the Israel Museum’s Archaeology Wing, marking a symbolic return of the Emperor to Jerusalem, whose last visit to the city was in 130 CE. From the thousands of bronze portraits that dotted the landscape of Hadrian’s empire, only three survive. The Israel Museum’s bronze, which was found in a Roman legion camp near Beth Shean in the north of Israel, depicts the emperor in military garb with beautifully preserved body armor. It is flanked by two other extraordinary examples: — one from the British Museum found in 1834 in the river Thames, which may have been created to commemorate Hadrian’s visit to Britain in 122 CE, and one from the collection of the Louvre Museum, considered to have originated in Egypt or Asia Minor.

[Exhibition information courtesy of The Israel Museum]

The Israel Museum, Derech Ruppin, Jerusalem