Exhibitions

In the 1950s, a number of professional photographers were active in Haifa. Some worked for local institutions and government bodies. Amiram Erev (the “Solel Boneh Photography Studio”) and Moshe Gross (the “Keren Or” studio), for example, documented the period’s bustling industries and massive surge of construction. Alongside Arav and Gross, photographers passing through the city — such as Boris Carmi and Zoltan Kruger — commemorated its unique views.

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 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.

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.

This exhibition captures the history of the Haifa port through photographs, maps, documents and films; it tells the story of the complex relationship between the port and the city from the late 19th century to the present.

During the 19th century, after centuries of neglect, Palestine was thriving. The contribution of the masses of Jewish immigrants of the First Aliya in 1882 to this process is well known. Less known are the various Christian initiatives which, in some cases, preceded the First Aliya.

During the second half of the 19th century, numerous Western travelers with a penchant for Orientalism journeyed to the Holy Land. In 1882, Elise and Lawrence Oliphant and a group of family members and friends settled in the German colony in Haifa (at what is currently 16 Ben-Gurion Boulevard).

The Shemen (oil) plant was one of the pioneering industrial plants around the Haifa Bay. Shortly after its foundation, in 1906, the plant was called Atid (future).

This exhibition is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Ranan Lurie, one of the world's leading political caricaturists.

The fact that fairy tales are universal, transcending time and place, enabled each of the illustrators to create "new fairy tales" with new messages consistent with the present times.