Museum on the Seam

Opening Events

Address: Kheil ha-Handasa St. 4

Thursday 14.03.2024 at 19:00

Closing Date: Tuesday 30.04.2024 (time will be announced)

Orayta: From Content to Form

Curator: David Sperber

Artists: Helène Aylon, Arie Aroch, Adi Drimer, Avraham Eilat, Ofra Erel, Andi Arnovitz, Netanel Bollag, Raya Bruckenthal, Nechama Golan, Jack Jano, Yael Kanarek, Roo Cohen Eilam, Raffi Lavie, Eti Levi, Michal Na’aman, Nona Orbach, Israel Rabinovitz, Dafna Shalom, Joseph Sassoon Semah, Michael Sgan Cohen, Arik Weiss, Drora Weitzman

Contemporary artists use sacred texts as raw materials in their works. They choose to engage with the materiality of the text itself by copying, overlaying, stamping and blurring it. These works emphasize the value of the sacred text itself through its materiality, which tradition treats as sacred beyond its content. The evolution from focusing on the meaning of the text to examining its materiality and structure is one of the prominent elements in contemporary Jewish art. The shift from narrative to form and from semantics to the physicality of texts crystallizes into works that can be understood as traces of an action in which the materiality of the text and the idea of embedded holiness is the content of the work. Once the text has been severed from its textuality, its materiality, previously unremarkable, is discovered. Orayta examines various incarnations of this trend and suggests understanding it as a new kind of Torah study.

Rebel Women from the Apocrypha

Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari

Artist:  Marcelle Hanselaar

What captivated Marcelle Hanselaar’s imagination was the fierce independence of her characters: Eve, Judith, Jezebel, Delilah, Lilith, and others.

Having been exposed to what she describes as their feisty and even subversive personalities in various artistic and cultural representations, the Jewish women she shows in Rebel Women from the Apocrypha are all rebelling against a deep-seated patriarchal order that is far from dead.

The fifteen stories chosen by Hanselaar as the catalyst for her new series have their origin in the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition, but she does not come to them from a faith background. And the artist does not argue that these rebellious women are all ‘good’ heroines, nor that they are always just and vindicable as victims-turned-avengers.

In the artist’s vivid portrayals they are all, however, brazenly, “on top”: commanding their own sexuality, agency, position, and plot. Through a forceful blend of expressive characterisation, dark humor, and idiosyncratic style that draws inspiration from such print masters and storytellers as Francisco Goya and Paula Rego, Hanselaar presents us with a fresh take on these age-old myths that both describes the engrained vilification and demonization of women in Western culture, and defiantly reclaims their unruly power. 

Hanselaar defines the word apocrypha broadly, adding her own ideas as an interpreter rather than as an illustrator of the biblical scenes in order to bring these stories to life for a 21st century audience.  

Bingyi: Emei Mountains 

Curator: Leeza Ahmady

Artist:  Bingyi

Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts (FSA) presents a large scroll painting and performance video by renowned Beijing and Los Angeles-based artist Bingyi, created in 2018 at sacred Buddhist mountain sites in China as a land and weather project entitled Emei Mountains.

Bingyi’s multifaceted practice spans ink, environmental, and performance art, as well as site-specific architectural installation; she  draws inspiration from traditional Chinese Shan Shui landscape painting and ancient Daoist philosophy, and adopts a non-anthropocentric perspective to channel nature's creative agency.

 The inspiration for this work, also called the "Weeping Mountains and Rivers" series, originated in a transcendental experience Bingyi had in 2009 while visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.