A Research Trip to Israel

• Images

This trip offered an inside look at contemporary art in Israel. The art scene conducts a dialogue with stories, memories and images taken from personal and collective memory. In the visit we saw works of various artists active in and outside of Israel.
We conducted studio-visits, meetings with a number of artists meeting them in their natural (working) environment.  Some of them deal with social issues and some raise questions about sex identity, about love and about death. Some work is made as a social or even cultural protest and some as an outright criticism of the existing situation.

In Israel, like other nations, photography and video art occupy more and more a central part in self definition. More and more also archives play a central role in this.
We visited two photographic archives, both with vast and broadly oriented collections including contemporary art works.One is in Tel Aviv : The Shpilman Institute for Photography . The second is: the Umm –El Fahem Gallery. In each place we saw works considered part of national identity and as a way to tell the history of the place from very different political points of view.
We visited some of the major museums in Israel (With strong Photo collections). Among them: Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
During this visit the artists had a chance to meet the scholarly and the experienced art professionals and through all of that to open a channel for future cooperation.

 Supported by KUNSTENISRAEL, Amsterdam