The exhibition “A Place on the Timeline” brings together students from the Tel Hai Institute of Arts with items from the museum’s collection. The students from the art, ceramics and goldsmithing departments raise personal and collective questions on the topics of place, time and society.

A place on the timeline – a dialogue with the collection of the Bar-David Museum and the Tel-Hai Institute of Arts.

The exhibition “A Place on the Timeline” brings together students from the Tel Hai Institute of Arts with the collection of the Bar-David Museum. The dialogue takes place between the Israeli artists, the Jews, the craftsmen who decorated the many Judaica objects in the collection, and the students’ works on the concept of “the place”.

“The place” brings together personal and historical memories, diverse local identities, culture and ethnicity. The place is created when we feel that we are not randomly placed in space but occupy a unique and significant part within it, create the memory in it, design the space in it, and curate the smells that rise from it. The patchwork quilt that corresponds with the landscape of the artist Yosef Yaakov, is filled with personal memories. Snuff boxes filled with cotton bring to mind the smell of a field, of late summer and speak to snuff boxes from the 19th century. The exhibition brings the students together with different meanings of “place”, to their place in time or to the physical place, to the private place or to the environment and landscapes.

The modern concept says that “place” is a general name that defines constitutive concepts such as stability, logic and order. The place is therefore a dwelling, a home – where life’s needs are met. A place emerges when the existence of a subject in a given environment takes the form of a continuous and stable presence. Between the works of art from the museum’s collection and the students’ works, the question arises as to what is a home, what is its physical and conceptual-symbolic quality, and how is the feeling of home created. What happens when the feelings of stability and logic crumble, when the house crumbles. Is there room for rebuilding?

A place is the land, but without the mythical alliance between man and land, the land remains a form of raw, physical material experience, a dark being that works from within itself and for itself like the cleft rocks that reveal microscopic worlds within them, charred and dark earth in which the silver pins are stuck like an electric pole on virgin land. The place on the timeline encodes ancient past and historical stories. A place where there was a language, a tradition, and where the definition of the material was different, like the clay tablets with the ancient cuneiform writing, which took on innovative meanings in the exhibition.

The place is the symbolic space of the language and connects to a marked space where the artists choose to linger, to observe from perspectives that invite reconsideration of the studio, the sources of inspiration and the connection to the local culture, to the Jewish tradition and its place in the lives of the participants, and what is their reaction to the ideas expressed by the Israeli artists in the past about the place. When observing nature, the works, the environmental folklore, one recognizes personal qualities, feelings and thoughts, which relate to the personal and collective identity of each of the participants, when each of them chooses their own “place” to relate to, and together create a landscape, environment and new meanings for the concept of “place” in art the Israeli one.

Presenting artists:

Danit Blomberg, Mittal Lautner, Tili Aroch, Racheli Dror,
Yonatan Dovash, Yair Gleicher, Uriah Edani, Yair Gleicher, Ruth Oliel
Nega Sela, Hagit Basan, Shai Maor, Rozan Batris Khouri, Shani Leon
Amit Gamliali, Gal Mitchell McClain, Rotem Davidan, Neta Harubi,
Rotem Frank, Dor Meir, Nitzan Goren, Tamar Shamir, Hani Plaising

Curator: Neely Keren

Professional escort: Avi Ifergan, Nega Haddad, Maya Getsov-Pek, Gon Rosenson