Exhibitions

The exhibition sheds light on a chapter of the city's history that is absent from most realms of memory – the portrait of Haifa's Arab society as mirrored by its architecture.

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 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.

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 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 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.

In honor of the CZA's centennial, a number of exhibitions in museums throughout Israel will present materials kept in the archives. The Haifa City Museum has chosen to focus on the collection of Haifa posters and broadsides preserved in the archives. The collection affords an opportunity to learn about daily life in Haifa, about the different ideologies that characterized different periods in the life of the city, and about local graphic designers and printing houses.