The donkey lived here long before we did, and will be here long after we're gone. His chronicles as a local symbol have known ups and downs, just like us – who have suffered cultural shocks in the man-time-place relationship,and will continue doing so.
Among the goals that the Negev Museum of Art set itself in recent years is highlighting the Negev's place and importance in the plastic arts in Israel. And indeed, exhibitions are devoted to themes related to the Negev, and works by local artists are regularly part of the museum's exhibition schedule. Dani Karavan's Negev Brigade Monument is undoubtedly the most significant work of art in the region, and one of the most important ever created in Israel. It is historically and geographically connected to the Negev, and is a prominent landmark for visitors from the region, from across Israel and abroad. The initiative to hold an exhibition wholly dedicated to the monument was raised as early as December 2010 and Karavan immediately agreed to the idea. Guest curator Adi Englman curated the exhibition and accompanying events with talent and determination, in addition to editing and producing the monument guide. It is thanks to her efforts that the programme was so successfully realized.
This exhibition strives to investigate the desert as an open expanse on both the geographic and spiritual level, as a state of anticipating the unknown, and as a frontier region with its own rules that exists on the margins of time and space.
Forty years after the Yom Kippur War, its effects on Israeli society are still unclear: an uneasy silence enfolds the stories of soldiers who fought in it, and the reactions among civilian Israelis. The exhibition's title is taken from the 'Red Everlasting' flower, known in Hebrew as Blood of the Maccabees. On Israel's Memorial Day, the flower is used to symbolize the fallen.
The New Barbizon Group is a refreshing and important arrival on the art scene in Israel and beyond. It comprises five Israeli women artists who were trained in art academies in the Soviet Union, and later in Israel and Europe, who leave the studio as a group to paint from observation, usually in an urban setting.
The exhibition of Eyal Segal presents two video works. While each differs from the other in terms of subject, length and screening format, both have a shared poetic-aesthetic approach and roam visually through places far from the eye.
Micha Bar-Am, one of the pillars of photography in Israel, has travelled and photographed southern Israel since the 1950s. Over the years he has recorded diverse aspects of life in this region: the stunning natural phenomena of the desert, the new towns in the Negev and the immigrant pioneers who settled there, the farmers of the kibbutzim and moshavim, the Bedouins and their settlement, army manoeuvres, leaders and ordinary citizens, children and the elderly, markets and houses, festivals and daily routine.
Sigalit landau's exhibition is a powerful occurrence in several chapters spreading throughout the museum halls and the adjacent garden. It holds new as well as earlier works, some not previously displayed in Israel; a remarkable weave of life stories and memoirs with sculpted images, movement and sound.
The exhibition "In Between" shows a variety of works in which the paper itself is the artistic medium and artists investigate its expressive possibilities.
The exhibition presents a selection of Menashe Kadishman's works produced
throughout his career, principally in prints and sculpture. It features well-known
works, together with others shown for the first time.
A variety of perspectives on the South, created over the past twenty years by eleven prominent artists born in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Some of them are southern-born and former residents, who regularly return to the Negev as a primary theme in their works.
