In the Land of My Love

About the Exhibition

The exhibition “In the Land of My Love: The Israeli Art Collection of Phoenix Holdings at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art” extends over the museum’s three floors. It represents three perspectives on local identity as reflected in the collection, in works created from  the early 20th century to the early 21st century. The display on the first floor – (Non) Place – is concerned with place and locality as changing values in the Israeli discourse on identity. It explores the vacillation between a longing for place and a yearning to belong, and between the concrete act of settlement and the difficulties it involves. The display on the second floor – Body of Work – is concerned with performances of the body. These range from the Zionist body and its appearance in contrast to the diasporic body and as a metaphor for the reconstitution of the state, to explorations of gender in the contemporary politics of identity and to its dissolution and disintegration. The display on the third floor – What’s New at Home? Is concerned with the concept of home as both an image and a concrete entity, and with the home’s inhabitants, its interior spaces, and the objects that fill it. At the same time, it explores the home’s status as a symbolic territory existing in relation to the external sphere, which generally represents the national ethos. 

Thes three displays do not map a single chronological and historical development or form a uniform, linear continuum. Rather, they shape encounters between different works and artists of different generations, creating gazes at the intersection of different periods, artistic strains and trends, ideologies and techniques. These encounters call for a rereading of each and every work, while offering a contemporary, vital, and relevant gaze at a period encompassing more than a century of Israeli culture. The exhibition is constructed as a multilayered sphere, inviting an exploration of the tectonic shifts deep within this place – a journey in search of an identity in the labyrinth of local existence, at the nerve center of the Israeli genome.

Roni Cohen-Binyamini