Expressive graffiti in Jaffa

The Jaffa seaport is one of the oldest harbors in the world; it has been in use, they say, since the Bronze Age. So today, just as they did nine thousand years ago, ships bring in cargo, and sun-baked fishermen pull in nets wriggling with mullet, grouper, and sea bream. The port is alive with crowds, shops, and restaurants—and naturally, it has its share of galleries.

“One of the oldest harbors in the world”

The artist-run Ilana Goor Museum, filled with a jungle of sculptures and objects, has been open to the public for many years, but there are newcomers to the neighborhood. Zadik—described by its director, Hana Coman, as “the people’s gallery of Jaffa”—is a long, pale-walled space hung with contemporary works; the gallery also hosts evenings of lectures and live music. Inga Gallery features conceptual artists from Israel and abroad, while Tempo Rubato presents everything from 2-D work to full-scale installations. As in Kiryat Hamelacha, many of the public walls in this quarter are covered with street art and graffiti: cartoon monsters, jaggedy boys and girls, fierce 2-D animals, and words in the Western, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets. It is also home to the Jaffa Art Salon, a vast, cavelike gallery filled with works by a variety of artists from the area.

Ilana Goor Museum > 

Inga Gallery >

Jaffa Art Salon >

Tempo Rubato >

Zadik Gallery >

Lively Art Spaces at the Ancient Port of Jaffa

Sommer Contemporary Art on Rothschild Blvd in Tel Aviv courtesy of the gallery

Tel Aviv has a very fresh, inquisitive energy, and its arts scene is nothing less than cutting edge. Galleries abound here. On and around the stately, tree-lined central boulevard Sderot Rothschild, many of the streets are dotted with art spaces: including Sommer Contemporary Art, which showcases Israeli and international artists, and encourages budding curators by allowing them to organize small shows in their space. The Chelouche Gallery, located in a magnificent four-floor space on Mazeh Street known as the “Twin House,” features contemporary art of many media, from painting and sculpture to video and installation work.  Beit Ha’ir’s space on Bialik Street once served as a Town Hall building; now it shows work by today’s artists and also hosts cultural events on its roof terrace. The up-and-coming Florentine neighborhood is often compared to New York’s Williamsburg, with its young vibe and population of hipsters. It’s home to Hezi Cohen gallery, which represents Israeli heavy-hitters like Sigalit Landau, Ron Amir, and Aviv Naveh. Also located in Florentine is the dynamic new Meshuna gallery—with its grungy walls hung floor to ceiling with works, it stretches the definition of art space in a fascinating way.

“Galleries abound here, showing work from the traditional to the abstract to the most provocative.”

Tel Avivians and visitors from all over the world wander in and out of these exhibition spaces, some perplexed by the mysteries of the latest conceptual folly, some at home in the realm of the avant-garde, still others seeking a classic oil on canvas by an Israeli master such as Reuven Rubin—and such treasures can be found. 

Beit Ha’ir >

Chelouche Gallery >

Hezi Cohen gallery >

Meshuna > 

Sommer Contemporary Art >

       

Arts in Tel Aviv: A Fresh, Inquisitive Energy

Installation view of “9 Artists Walls”,  ArtSpace TLV. Photo by Yuval Chen Courtesy of the Gallery

“Many young artists live and work in this area.”

In South Tel Aviv, the neighborhood of Kiryat Hamelacha has all the elements of fertile grounds for art: a gritty, working-class area nowhere near gentrified (yet), where empty warehouses provide perfect studio spaces, and public walls serve as open canvases for the likes of Know Hope, Klone, and Zero Cents, three of Israel’s boldest and most energetic street artists. Raw Art, which opened in 2005, is a relative old-timer in the neighborhood. Rosenfeld Gallery, Feinberg Projects, and Litvak Contemporary are three exhibition venues nestled into the tiny HaMif’al street; all showcase Kiryat Hamelacha’s offbeat aesthetic. The Indie Photography Group Gallery focuses on work by contemporary artists working in photo-based media. Other new artists’ collective spaces—Hanina, Alfred, and Artspace Tel Aviv—serve as launch-pads for emerging young artists, many of whom live and work in this area. 

Alfred Gallery >

Artspace Tel Aviv >

Feinberg Projects >

Hanina >

Indie Photography Group Gallery >

Litvak Contemporary >

Rosenfeld Gallery >

Raw Art >

 

Kiryat Hamelacha, Where Public Walls Serve as Open Canvases

Artist Michal Rovner contructing one of her stone "Makom" structures

On Michal Rovner’s small farm in Ayalon Valley she keeps a pack of white dogs, each the size of a small furry sofa, and a donkey named Nof (meaning “Landscape”). “I always like to be close to the ground,” she says. “I always like to touch the earth, I like to smell it, I like to see people creating something that is very real, that has a very real dimension, when I wake up in the morning.” In her meadow stands a stone structure, like a temple, in the middle of the wide mantle of colorful blossoms.

“These are the ingredients that make me who I am.”
— Michal Rovner

Such monumental stone structures—collectively titled Makom (Place)—are at the center of Rovner’s thinking and her art. In the film Out in the World, we see the painstaking process of assembling one, block by weighty stone block, outside the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where Rovner’s work was showcased. The structures are fully cohesive—clean-lined, room-size boxes with perfect, mysterious apertures for peering in, or for entry or exit—yet the stones derive from a variety of dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian houses, from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, Nablus, Hebron, the Galilee, and elsewhere. The lifetime of the stones in her Makom pieces is greater than the singular grievances of any one person’s brief time here.

Often, Rovner inspects humanity as a scientist inspects a new virus under a microscope, or as an entomologist studies insects: as a teeming curiosity, as a single multi-minded organism. In much of her imagery, swarms of humanlike creatures, unidentifiable as individuals, march in file over landscapes and across screens, or crawl like ants over rocks.

The artist is clearly at home in her Ayalon farm/studio, which has a spartan magic: a single red poppy raises its head from a vase on a deep white windowsill; outside, the branches of an orange tree are weighted down with fruit. “This place is my element,” she says. “These are the ingredients that make me who I am.”

 

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel. 

 

Michal Rovner: This place is my element

Sculptor Micha Ullman. Still from the film Out in the World.

 “I am interested in the level of our shoe soles—and below,” says sculptor Micha Ullman. He is speaking both metaphorically and literally. Some of his work has been dubbed “subterranean sculpture”—as with his 1995 Bibliothek (Library), located beneath Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the infamous site of Nazi book burnings in 1933. The work is an underground room filled with nothing but walls of empty shelves: a library without books, visible only by looking downward through a pavement-level window set into the cobblestone square. Visitors pause and consider, remember, mourn.

“What is full and what is empty, earth and air, matter and spirit . . . where does one thing end and another begin?”
— Micha Ullman

Sand—often the orange-red sand of the Sharon area north of Tel Aviv, where Ullman lives—has been a staple medium of his for many years; it provides, he says, a kind of language for him. At Sands of Time, Ullman’s 2011 retrospective at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum (for which we see him preparing in the film Out in the World), the floors were dotted with heavy minimalist iron structures coated with rust-colored sand.

Ullman’s works are as silent as history: viewers bring to them what interpretations they will. There is a deceptive simplicity to his sculptures, which contend with basic human relations or derive from everyday elements: a chair, a television, a book, a camera, a table. As in life, the meanings are never clear—except perhaps for the idea that there is duality in all things. “For me,” he says, “a pit is above all a question regarding the relationship between what is full and what is empty, earth and air, matter and spirit . . . where does one thing end and another begin?” The concave and convex are integrally connected, of course. “I look for good in evil,” says Ullman, “for the sky in a pit.”

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel. 

 

Micha Ullman: Sculptures made of Iron and sand, as silent as history

Sigalit Landau sculpting a wax casting

Sigalit Landau works in a range of media and modes, from sinewy sculptures of elongated human figures to conceptual videos and films to massive installations. A former dancer, the artist is closely attuned to corporeality: she engages the idea of the body in nearly all her work. In one of Landau’s most striking videos, Dead See (2005), her own body becomes part of a dreamlike form floating in the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea: a spiral raft made of watermelons, threaded together like massive green-and-red beads, and her naked self.

“I like to be on the periphery…if I had to make a choice, I would choose to be here.”
— Sigalit Landau

Among the artist’s enduring and elemental fixations are water, sugar, meat, earth, and in particular salt. She has long planned to build a bridge of salt between Israel and Jordan, and for her 2016 project Salt Bride, she submerged a replica of a traditional Hasidic dress in the waters of the Dead Sea—no easy feat given the mineral-dense water’s buoyancy—the garment hovers there like a specter. “Salt heals, preserves, hides, kills,” Landau has said. And of the Dead Sea, which has provided her with such inspiration, she observes, “[It] has myths and (pre)history all around its shores, stories of radicalism, Christianity, heroics, unbelievable agriculture—and it is a border as well, so the behavior of salt and the natural environment is highly metaphoric, and keeps changing direction as I experiment.”

Israel is a very small country, and the number of major art venues is limited. “Many very good Israeli artists are living abroad,” says Landau. Why does she stay? “I like to be on the periphery, for various reasons. If I had to make a choice, I would choose to be here.”

It is perhaps inevitable that an Israeli artist will make work that engages society and politics, whether obliquely or directly. Artists have an advantage over politicians, as Landau eloquently observes: “Through politics you can show bottom lines. But bottom lines are never good. Through art, you can show much more complex things.”

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel. 

Sigalit Landau: An Artist with Elemental Fixations