The ocean tide, with its cycling rise and fall, defines the ever-changing encounter between land and sea. Its constant cycle eternally travels between disclosure and concealment, calm and storm, buoyancy and submersion. Dissecting the term “tide” as an image reveals a dual significance at each end of the spectrum – positive and negative aspects existing side by side. The rising tide, which can flood and submerge, may also carry us to safety. Similarly, the receding tide can symbolize hitting rock bottom, the very lowest point possible – and yet, as the water draws back, dry land is revealed underneath.

This exhibition, like cycling tides themselves, has no beginning nor end point. A lack of clear-cut adjudication allows for an examination and re-evaluation of dichotomy as a concept. These works invite bodies and minds to wander intuitively amongst new takes on utopia and dystopia, destruction and rebuilding, on desperation and hope. Thomas Hobbes once wrote “...because life itself is but motion”, and we float on, drawn by the current – between the rising and falling tides.

The act of constructing an ark is an architectural, scientific and spiritual action of great emergency, underlined by a clear purpose: survival under extreme conditions. The divine edict given in the various mythical sources often includes a physical description of the ark, complete with measurements and details of both the materials needed for construction as well as the precise desired cargo. This commandment, in a contemporary context, serves as a metaphor for the design, engineering, and speculative actions taken to confront extreme and complicated climate conditions, laying down the infrastructure that allows for a long, independent state of being.

The works displayed in this space offer up interpretations of and reactions to emergency. They challenge the role of design, as a discipline, within the realms of preparation and planning for the future; in humanity’s survivability, on both the private and cultural planes; as well as both the conceptual and tangible tools available to designers wishing to take on this fateful task.

Welcome to the Anthropocene, our current geological climate period, characterized by complete human influence and ever-growing control over the planet. The entirety of life on earth, in all its forms, has been dragged along on this wild ride, without consent – so whether we like it or not, it is our duty and responsibility to protect it.

The act of crossbreeding designs life, playing (perhaps irresponsibly) with the controls of creation itself. However, it may also be detrimental to the conservation of life, particularly human life, in the face of impending climate disaster.

This body of work offers a view into the unprecedented effect man has had on the natural world, utilizing playful design. As such, these works encourage one to contemplate enhancement by means of hybridization and crossbreeding, as well as the manipulation and direction of species – for these two spheres represent, among other things, our attempt to control nature, and reflect our responsibility for the ongoing mass extinction. Perhaps we are the ones conjuring a second flood.

Far away, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault is essentially a safe, providing and protecting the possibility of reestablishing agriculture in the event of apocalyptic disaster. Holding over 1.5 million types of seeds from edible plants, the vault acts as an ark – giving hope to the survival (from the biological aspect) of humankind.

Countless pieces of material, cultural assets are conserved just as strictly in places such as museum cellars, on shelves of national libraries, and locked in government vaults. These proxy arks carry immense responsibility in their attempt to guarantee the survival of human culture and wisdom. The task of gathering and collecting their contents can therefore signify an archival framework, through which pieces are selected with careful attention and then presented as either glorious achievements of the past, or building blocks of a possible future.

Throughout this exhibition, collections are presented as time capsules, full to the brim with local knowledge collected and compiled into innovative assortments. These artists and designers offer their personal interpretations of the importance of material conservation, by utilizing methods of design, mapping, selection, dissection and reassembly.

Mar-eh Makom (‘reference’, literally ‘show of place’) is a term relating to referral or diversion, whether quoting a source of information or serving as evidential support for a certain detail in a given text. The collection of books displayed here diverts our attention to quotes utilized by our local culture as well as to the many sources they stem from: nature and landscape, constructed spaces, politics, society and the individual.

A book, as an object, represents the craft of local book design – going beyond the literal content within and extending to the entire framework of craft and design choices and decisions directly related to the book’s essence: typefaces,  choice of paper, formant, grid, layout, color, and many other aspects that affect the experience of leafing through its pages. It is from within the sum of these decisions that a book may operate as a valuable object of not only textual, but cultural preservation as well.

This collection of books, acting as references (or ‘Views of Places’), also collectively represents academic, independent and commercial achievement, illuminating the wide range of cultural sources in Israel and beyond it.

We have, in collaboration with The Print House (Re’a), expanded the singular, restricted perception of an image into the larger context that constitutes a book. A selection of enlarged photographs and illustrations allows viewers to perceive an image as a complete work of its own.

Hotels and hostels in Israel have undergone transformation, morphing from spaces of leisure and recreation into crowded temporary shelters, much like the biblical ark becoming a temporary habitat for all walks of life. This year, the academic exhibition spaces become cabins, from which we can examine how their character has changed over this difficult period, and ask how values such as readiness for change, uprooting, wandering and temporality redefine the infrastructure of our lives.

Meteorological Farm at Hansen House

The biblical tale of Noah's ark is  a disaster story of epic proportions, on the one hand illustrating a crack in the relations between man and the divine, while highlighting humanity's ancient fear of nature and disaster on the other.

Throughout mythology and folklore worldwide, ‘nature’ is often described as an independent entity. Every so often the daring will of man stands in the face of nature’s unexpected powers, attempting to control his destiny, and predict the future. Some put their ears to the ground and invoke rain by dancing, while others install sensors on their roofs, put up weather balloons, or go as far as shooting a satellite into orbit – all in order to foresee tomorrow and provide a glimpse of certainty regarding the weather. Despite this, in just a single moment, the sky may tear open, flooding, destroying and washing with torrential rains. In a mere matter of minutes the sea can rise up and overrun the land.

‘The Forecast’ offers a selection of new works that together comprise a meteorological farm on the Hansen grounds. Through the eyes of local artists and designers, working in collaboration with professionals from the Israeli Meteorological Service, this exhibition draws up a situation report – detailing the relations between man and the (physical) heavens, exploring our attempts to comprehend the forces at work, while incessantly collecting and interpreting information in hopes of predicting the next flood.

The installations presented here act as survey apparatus, presenting past data and physical expressions of real-time measurements, alongside works containing artificial weather phenomena – thus bypassing the act of natural formation.

This exhibition was created in cooperation with the Beit Dagan Meteorological Service, its works crafted in reaction to meteorological practice: methods of survey and measurement, selection of relevant data, and their transformation into visual information.

Echoing into the Future | Sound Capsules from Jerusalem

A capsule is an encrypted vessel, a code known only to the deliverer and recipient. A capsule may alternately provide healing substances or an imaginary escape from reality. Throughout human history and literature, sending off an encrypted capsule - such as the archetypal message in a bottle - out to sea, has constituted a call for assistance and rescue, an act of hope from those desperate individuals cast away on unknown lands.
A sign of life, launched upon the waves and currents of the mighty oceans, also resembles the dove released from Noah’s ark. The dove embodies the sign of life on the ark, and serves as an ambassador – complete with responsibility and an expectation to return with an answer, a hint of land, actual evidence of the world’s return.

The ‘sound capsules’ presented here act as echo chambers, audial mechanisms and sound amplifiers. A group of musical creatures, playing along and invoking a Bat Kol [lit. ‘voice’s daughter’, an expression of divine voice in Jewish traditions] – an audio message to the future. These capsules contain echoes of moments in time, secret melodies expressed with a yearning, hoping to whisper or scream their way into an imaginary future world.

The 2024 Matchmaker project addresses Jerusalem as a cultural echo chamber, reacting to its complex reality and the voices of our times. At the heart of this project is a collaboration of artists and designers on the one hand with musicians and sound professionals on the other, all of whom are active in Jerusalem. These connections explore the relationships between matter and sound, between body and mind, employing the power embedded in music – to create alternate realities, even if just for a mere fleeting moment.

The sound capsules in this exhibition are, in essence, the hybrid offspring of the collaboration between its participants, placed here as intimate, personal and collective listening experiences – echo chambers of a periodic soundtrack, inviting you to lend an ear.