True Stories – A Cluster of Solo Exhibitions

״Every exhibition,״ noted art theorist Boris Groys, ״tells a story, by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order; the exhibition space is always a narrative space.״ This cluster of solo exhibitions, featuring six artists, sheds light on this narrative quality, presenting life stories, culture, and history, marked by an alternative reading of the physical and the metaphysical. The exhibition cluster ״True Stories״ highlights the need to tell and structure a story through art and to unfold it inside art׳s exhibition space; it addresses the ways in which story and art relate to the notions of authentic and fake, reality and fiction, illusion, consciousness, and that which lies beyond it. The different projects explore the narrativity innate to private and public–collective situations, the transformation it undergoes in the transition between media, its glorification and disintegration, and the way it is experienced as total and critical.

Karim Abu Shakra׳s exhibition of (mainly self–) portraits, curated by Neta Gal–Azmon, presents a stormy narrative of pain bound with the inability to touch upon the self without acknowledging the other, his otherness in body and mind, and our responsibility towards him. Reality breaks forth through the ascetic, tormented figure of the portrait׳s subject, attesting, as noted by David Hume, that ״I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can I observe any thing but the perception.״

Gabi Kricheli constructs a scenic–sculptural space, in which the documentary and the fabricated blend. The objects and images signify paths of knowledge, research, and culture, while inquiring into the human legal system that is alternately constituted and deconstructed under the mastery of the work of art, marking the artist׳s imaginary control over the events.

Raya Bruckenthal׳s exhibition crumbles reality to establish other halls of consciousness in its place. It leads us between sites of compressed drawing and images of excess and glamor to ethereal worlds of sound, music, and language.Rather than structuring consciousness, it strives to show its metamorphoses, its constituent parts.

Naama Roth creates an alternative locus parallel to the memorial hall at Beit Yad LaBanim in the Museum Complex—a place that explores the space of memory in the Israeli experience through an alternative, imaginary, fantastic, and elusive proposal, based on the works of art displayed in the commemoration hall.

Sharon Azagi, in her sound–video installation, introduces a map of visual and sonic signs that outline our perception of the universe—the planetary system with the sun at its center—as a private and collective, scientific and religious experience, at once documentary and illusory.

The Second Floor Gallery at Beit Yad LaBanim features works extracted from a drawing diary by Reut Asimini and her daughter Mia. The diary begins in the early days of the COVID–19 pandemic, with an intensity that oscillates between ordinary and intimate everyday situations and moments of fantasy, anxiety, and nightmare.

An exhibition of New Acquisitions, curated by Meital Manor, spans works on paper purchased through the generosity of the Alona Stein–Moriah Foundation, centered on surrealistic, mysterious, and dark narratives embedded in contemporary reality.