מוזיאון על התפר - מוזיאון חברתי לאמנות עכשווית
MUSEUM ON THE SEAM Socio-Political Contemporary Art Museum
Current Exhibitions
Iris Hassid
A Place of Our Own
30/06/2026 – 30/01/2026
Artist: Iris Hassid
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
In her artistic practice, Iris Hassid examines questions of self-representation, identity, gender and transitional stages through an intimate, ongoing dialogue with her subjects – usually groups of girls and women. Since 2014, Hassid’s camera has been capturing moments from the daily lives of four students, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who study and live in Tel Aviv. The artist approached them in Ramat Aviv, where she lives, out of curiosity and keen interest in the highly visible presence of Arabic-speaking young women in the homogeneous Jewish neighborhood and on the Tel Aviv University campus nearby. Having experienced frequent relocations around the world as a child, she also felt a personal connection to the experiences of those young women, whom she approached gradually – experiences of foreignness, mobility and being away from home.
The first and significant acquaintance was with Samar, originally from Nazareth, who had just graduated from the School of Cinema and Television. Samar introduced Hassid to her cousin Saja, a psychology student, also from Nazareth; her friend Aya from Kafr Qara, who studied social work and gender studies; and Saja’s roommate Majdulin, an architecture student from Kafr Kanna. With time, hesitant encounters, some correspondence and spontaneous chats – at times casual, at times laden with emotion – deepened into a long-term relationship and an artistic project based on candid sharing and mutual trust.
Hassid photographed the four young women throughout and after their studies: in their rented apartments and workplaces, in their shopping sprees and hangouts in Tel Aviv, and during their family visits in the Galilee. The photographs are not meant to serve as a direct or “authentic” documentation of their world. Rather, they present portraits and snapshots shaped by consensual discussion – sometimes involving controversy and rejection – often staged but reliable representations of their preoccupations, dreams, aesthetic tastes and social relations, as well as of processes of maturation, searching and self-determination occurring within a complex set of identification and cultural contexts. The gaze in this work is not unidirectional: whereas Hassid gazes at her subjects, they return their gaze to the camera and to the artist, expressing reflections, doubts and criticism, aware of the constant tension between affinity and otherness.
Hassid decided that the first photo session take place at the Broshim Student City Dormitories near the university, built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. The burden of historical memory and the reality of life in Israel are also present in the following frames, framing the entire ongoing projects in different formats, under the specter of the events of the recent years – the growing nationalism, inflammatory public discourse and vendettas, culminating in October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza.
A Place of Our Own, originally published as a monograph and subsequently developed into an exhibition, offers a multilayered, multivocal portrait of a social group that often encounters exclusion, prejudice, and outright suspicion and hostility. It is an encounter with a new generation of women from Arab society in Israel – independent, career-oriented, feminist – who blaze an individual and collective trail within family, community and professional settings, and between the contradictory demands of a national majority and minority. In these spaces, questions of identity, visibility, belonging and shared living arise repeatedly against the background of a conflicted and radicalizing political reality, in the face of which, the creativity and the relationship formed between the women participating in that “place of our own” offer a source of strength and hope.
This exhibition has been organised in cooperation with the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam.
Curator of the original exhibition in Jewish Museum Amsterdam: Judith Hoekstra
The Amsterdam exhibition was realised in collaboration with Iris Hassid, at the initiative of Victor Levie.
On the Boundary of Memory
30/06/2026 – 30/01/2026
Artist: Said Abu Shakra
Curator: Nurit Tal-Tenne
Said Abu Shakra wonders in the obscure backstreets of his inner soul, raises questions, and burrows into wounds and scars through his return to the story of his family and their 1948 displacement from the village of Al-Lajjun, today Kibbutz Megiddo. The clash of mnemonic fragments of refugeehood and wonderings with the events of the ongoing present reawakens the trauma of the Nakba, thereby constructing an emotionally charged visual language that positions the studio as a shelter for spiritual transformation.
The artist recalls his childhood in Umm al-Fahem, which was replete with stories of love, war, displacement and longing. Above all hovers the image of the great mother, Mariam, who carries the image of all mothers as such. Inspiration, power, terror, hope and love – all are cast into words in his book Mariam, and into expressive and sensitive images on paper, presented in this exhibition.
Late at night, as the hyenas awaken to ensnare their prey while wailing in anguish across the distance, Said awakens as well, climbs up to the studio in his attic, and begins to wonder the mazes of memory and emotion, to cry out. Under the cover of darkness, Said hurls himself at the paper without traces, with outbursting energy, an urgent painting powerfully inscribed with a tightly held breath. The black charcoal line and the red paint spots highlight his pain.
His paintings from 2020-2023 are a wakeup call – a direct and swift blow. It seems a war is breaking out, and we must respond with concentrated strength. And there they are, the refugees, in a rhythm of powerful black lines and lightning brushstrokes that hammer the paper and stamp it with marks and dots, its whiteness gleaming like flashes of light. The marks fill out the entire frame; the crowded human figures are crammed into it, loaded and led to the unknown. In other works not reviewed here, Said himself is portrayed as a hyena.
Facing all those, paper scrolls from the recent time unfold the story of the present era over dozens of meters. Gunshots in a frantic pace and blinding smoke expanding in its smudginess to the point of chocking the white paper. And here are the beasts: fainted, dead, lying on their backs, their eyes betraying a pitiful gaze of bottomless despair.
The exhibition is a personal and collective journey where the artist ventures out of a process of intimate autobiographic writing and artwork centered on his mother’s image, opening a wide window unto the repressed and traumatic Palestinian memory, as it blends with latter-day events.
Transition Time
30/06/2026 – 30/01/2026
Artist: Liri Sandel
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
This work, representing the first museum exposure of Liri Sandel, deals with the fragility of home, with its psychological, symbolic, and physical aspects. On the personal level, it relates to the experience of parting from the parental home, a place steeped in memories and family history, and the transition to other, more or less permanent settings that carry the tentative promise of a new home. Against the background of the ongoing war and the undermining of the sense of stability, belonging, and security, leaving the childhood home is charged with additional emotional weight, even when it seems part of a natural and inevitable move. In the reality of real, tragic loss of homes and living fabrics, the wistful melancholic mood imbuing the installation congeals into a feeling of grief.
In this atmosphere, Sandel seeks to dwell on the minute moment of separation – not as a dramatic statement, but rather as a reserved observation of the little, mundane details that make up the home and its impression in memory. The glass prints – plain windowpanes engraved with laser – carry intimate traces accumulated over time: an unmade bed, sockets, a handle from the parental home, a sink from the current apartment, the contents of an exposed drawer. Home is presented here as the continuation of the body: the home as body and the body as home. Images like sink and stomach, drainage hole and navel, highlight a feminine, adolescent, or even infant-mother dimension, associating the work with the femmes maisons of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Francesca Woodman. At the same time, the engraving of the quotidian in glass – an expensive, disposable, and fragile material – confers an iconic, ritualistic quality on these minutiae; missing elements – a doorless handle, a floating window – call upon the viewers to complement their meaning.
The video in the exhibition serves as a silent performance – a kind of living image – which charts an emotional echo chamber that does not rely on action but on continuous presence in space. Filmed in the childhood room in northern Israel and the forest that surrounds it, it traces a process of transition, distancing, and transformed relations. The image is almost static, but time is present through minor movements – wind, breath, heartbeat – in a way that invites musing and an attentive gaze.
Sandel’s work refers to an artistic tradition that addresses home as a repository of traces, an inner world, and longing, including Rachel Whiteread’s liminal void sculptures and the textile works by Do Ho Suh, in which transparent and temporary habitations mark home as a construct that is simultaneously concrete and abstract. Home is reconstituted here as a memory pattern, and the transparent, spectral material echoes experiences of something that was, which accumulate additional contexts through their location in the museum space – in itself an architectural fragment, the ghost of a home that is no more.
Through sensitivity to the tiny details, to the margins between things, to the poetics and politics of space, Sandel’s “Transition Time” creates an associative, private-collective realm, where home is embodied as an ongoing condition of search, loss, and reconstruction.
The project was developed as part of the artist’s studies in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, supervised by Hila Ben Ari.
Welcome Home / Come Home
14/03/2024 - until all hostages return
Artists: Nelly Agassi, Emmanuel Evron-Agassi
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
Nelly Agassi created this neon installation with her son, Emmanuel, in a large-scale version that is on permanent display at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, where Agassi and her family immigrated from Israel thirteen years ago. In its original location, in a long passageway leading to the passport checkpoints and reception hall, the minimalist sign, written in a hesitant childlike handwriting, illuminates personal and collective experiences of distance, longing, and the ambivalence of being neither here nor there, while succinctly expressing the expectation and relief of coming home.
Commissioned by Museum on the Seam following the events of October 7 and the ensuing war, Agassi created a smaller version of the work. Its present location and the timing of its exhibition lend the ghostly inscription flickering on the wall different meanings and contexts. Displayed in an uncanny space inside the museum – a former Palestinian home turned military post – the work is now seen from a perspective overwhelmed by sights of abandoned, burnt, and bombarded houses. Like a broken road sign, the work blinks alternately, with the letters ‘Wel’ appearing and vanishing and the words “come home” remaining like a wish or hope suspended in empty space. Echoing the ongoing traumatic present of refugees, displaced persons, and evacuees for whom home has become a site of loss and catastrophe, above all the work seems to capture the twilight zone of the hostages. Suggesting a desperate, hopeful-demanding call for their release, it contains the consolation of those already home, while expressing their absent presence, from which there is no relief.
