Exhibitions

The term "public housing" elicits a clear image: uniform buildings three or four stories high, arranged in a row, dating from the 1950s and 1960s. In Israeli films from the 1980s, public housing serves as the backdrop of the remote, neglected places known as "the other Israel." These disregarded towns, situated far from the country's center, are populated mostly by Mizrahi Jews and feature a monotonous urban landscape.

The Rambam Hospital, previously a British government hospital, has been serving the residents of Haifa and the north of Israel for the past century. The hospital was founded by the British Mandate government, for the use of all of the city's residents: British, Arabs, and Jews as one. It is no accident that this institution was built in Haifa's Lower City, near the port, the train station, and in the center of the beating heart of Haifa at that time.

The dramatic change undergone by Haifa in the 1948 war still resonates in the city's urban space, its buildings, residents, and cultural-historic climate. This exhibition seeks to present the many aspects of that fateful year.

The current exhibition examines different ways of classifying and constructing a historical collection, and the differing interpretations of the field's leading "actors": the collector, the curator, and the historian. It reflects different ways of presenting and interpreting a collection: scientific means of classification and cataloging ("typology"), a theme-oriented division into meta-categories, interpretations that rely on an academic approach or on non-theoretical writing, and more. These interpretations represent a multiplicity of views of the "historical truth

. The show seeks to create a sequence of Haifa views – beginning with the old postcards and ending with contemporary photographs taken using a smartphone and Instagram filters. The medium has changed over the years, but the same iconic viewpoints have remained attractive and are now disseminated to the entire world. The Instagram photos, presented in the exhibition space alongside the cards, thereby acquire a new and unexpected meaning.

Aviv Itzhaky (b. 1949) is a photographer born in Haifa. In the 1970s and 1980s he travelled between Haifa, Jerusalem, and Paris, experiencing the changes undergone by the Jewish community in Israel and in France in those years. During this period he created an impressive and comprehensive body of work depicting the urban environments in which he lived and the wealth of forms he found there.

The collections of Dr. Yirmiyahu Rimon (born in Haifa, 1933-2018), constituting one of the largest and most important private collections on the history of Palestine and Zionism, are the product of decades of enthusiastic and diligent collectorship. They bring to mind Walter Benjamin's definition, in an essay on collecting (in The Flaneur), of the collector as a courageous rebel, collecting objects not for their utilitarian value but rather according to their beauty and the memories they evoke.

This exhibition was created following the acquisition of the Rimon Collection by the Haifa Museums – a step that introduced a large private collection into the museum space. The exhibition addresses the tension between the "private collection" and the "museum collection" in the diverse

With reference to such "Cabinets of Wonder" and to the artistic-curatorial discourse that has developed in recent decades in Israel and abroad, we sought to examine the inventory of the Haifa Museums' storage rooms with a fresh gaze. We searched out the wonderful, the exotic, the amusing. In the exhibition hall we stacked objects and works arbitrarily – lacking any "class-based" hierarchy, with no commitment to chronological-historical organization or to the representation of a meta-narrative.

You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibitions on Saturday 25 July 2017, 8.00 pm.