Current Exhibitions

Gaston Zvi Ickowicz
Flammable Materials
30/05/2025 – 03/01/2025
Artists: Deganit Berest, Ronit Citri, Yair Hovav, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Mahmood Kaiss, Yael Ruhman, Ariel Schlesinger, Chen Shapira
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
Flammable materials are easily combustible materials that keep burning even when moved away from the ignition source. As such, they hold within them not only the danger of conflagration, but also the fire itself – its duration, outcomes, and burns. The works in this exhibition, some familiar and others presented here for the first time, embody the same dreadful range – between the incendiary potential and the destructive effect of the flames, between the pent-up energy and the embers left behind.
The events of the past year have been and still are imbued with the concrete and metaphorical presence of fire. The concept of fire in Israeli culture, writes art historian Gideon Ofrat, is a core image: it is fanned by the myth of the burning bush, the flame of the alter and the firewood to which Isaac was bound; it is fanned also by the trauma of the burning Jewish towns and the crematoria of the Holocaust, the solemnity of the eternal fire in Yad Vashem, the fire-blackened survivors, and the memorial candle; it embodies the religious and national ethos of Lag BaOmer bonfires, youth movement campfires and fire inscriptions, and the national Torch-Lighting Ceremony; and wildfires in planted forests, in IDF shooting ranges, in warzones, in the volatile Palestinian Intifadas, and the foreign fire that devours homes, communities and individuals.
However, the visual language adopted by the works on display deliberately avoids the pathos this incitive subject appears to call for. Instead, the artists draw on material and medium-based sensibilities, employing strategies of abstraction, disruption, and defamiliarization to evoke a profound sense of disaster and unease. Through a crime-scene aesthetic that relies on hints and traces or generates tension and disquiet—and particularly through the palpable absence of human presence, the works reveal how fire and its explosive charges articulate ongoing processes of disintegration, moral corruption, and the devaluation of human life.
Monuments
30/05/2025 – 03/01/2025
Artist: Yoav Horesh
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
Monuments and memorials are built to last, to remain as prompters of remembrance far beyond the events recalled in living memory. They honor the past, whether that past is shared, contested, or troubled. However, the true significance of a monument often lies not in what it commemorates, but in the emotions, reflections, and actions it inspires. Conveying different messages to different audiences, monuments may encourage, empower, induce fear or empathy, intimidate, consolidate a sense of identity or set of values, and shape attitudes towards authority. Instrumental in cementing historical narratives, they also cast their shadow over social realities and imagined political futures.
Such notions and tensions underlie Yoav Horesh’s exhibition, which captures a decisive moment in the burdened history of Confederate monuments in the United States. These monuments, glorifying the leaders and legacy of the Confederacy — the eleven pro-slavery states that seceded in 1861, igniting the American Civil War — were intended to restore the South’s pride following its battleground defeat. At their ideological core was the promotion of the “Lost Cause” narrative, a revisionist account framing the Confederacy’s cause as a noble defense of states’ rights and Southern heritage, while obscuring slavery’s crucial role in the conflict.
Although initiated during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) by veteran groups and Confederacy loyalists, most Confederate monuments were not erected immediately after the Civil War. Instead, their construction peaked between the 1890s and 1920s, at the height of the Jim Crow segregation laws, and again in the 1950s and 1960s in the course of the Civil Rights Movement. These periods saw violent efforts to suppress the progress of African American equality by reasserting white supremacy through discriminatory policies, the formal disenfranchisement of Black voters, and the widespread terror of lynching. Strategically placed in prominent public spaces and in front of government buildings, these monuments projected dominance and served to reinforce existing power hierarchies.
In 2020, following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, protests erupted across the United States against institutionalized racism targeting people of color. This wave of civic unrest rekindled disputes over Confederate monuments and their contentious symbolism, leading to the defacement, damage, and, ultimately, the official removal of many statues —though still only a small fraction of the numerous ones that dominate the Southern landscape. Amid this societal reckoning, Horesh traveled to Richmond, Virginia — the former capital of the Confederacy — to document this pivotal moment of transition. The timing was critical, as these monuments were in the process of losing their ground amongst heated debates over their content, purpose, locations, and future.
Horesh’s use of a large-format film camera and traditional silver print techniques emphasizes the historical gravity of the events unfolding before his lens. The black-and-white photographs, inevitably evoking the racial dynamics embedded in the landscape, acutely capture the clash between opposing aesthetic and political languages. The grandiosity of the classical statues is confronted with the vibrant creativity of African American culture, as graffiti and hand-crafted commemorative elements — dedicated to victims of police brutality and hate crimes — transform these now counter-monuments into sites of demonstration and collective grief. This grassroots artistic resistance challenges the statues’ imposing presence, offering an alternative narrative to their original intent.
It is said that monuments are for the living, not the dead. Horesh’s images, displayed within the charged setting of the Museum on the Seam — itself a contested monument to a turbulent past and present — embody this profound truth. Through his lens, history is not simply preserved but actively interrogated, inviting viewers to consider their role in shaping collective memory and the stories that give it meaning.
Pitas
30/05/2025 – 03/01/2025
Artist: Yonatan Ron
Curator: Dr. Shir Aloni Yaari
In a small series of works on elongated wooden boards, Yonatan Ron presents oil paintings of pitas. Unlike the immediate associations evoked by its “lowbrow” image – an ordinary pastry, cheap and commonplace, emblematic of the Middle-Eastern lack of pretense or finesse, or of its authenticity, captured in the fork-free wiping movement that dips it in hummus — Ron’s baroque pitas, straddling the seam between nature morte and portrait, are depicted as larger than life. Painted one by one in close-up and dramatic foreshortening, they seem almost iconic, their tones and postures reminiscent of Christian masterpieces such as Mantegna’s “Lamentation of Christ” or Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”.
Unlike the eucharist, the Sabbath challah bread or the matzah (unleavened flatbread), the pita connotes no festivity or religious rituality. Quite the opposite: as the bread of the poorest in society and the quintessential street food, it is associated with the quotidian and mundane, with “life (as such) in a pita”, as the popular saying goes. For the artist, the pita is also a personal memory of his grandfather who used to sell falafel in Jerusalem’s main market, a memory processed in the paintings into a monumental portrait, that lends a sublime dimension to every humble piece of bread.
Being a staple and a culinary marker of both the Israeli and Palestinian cuisines, the pita is charged nevertheless with politica and symbolic meaning: at times, the object of criticism against cultural dispossession and reappropriation and sometimes a dream about coexistence and peace.
It was used to punish Palestinian political prisoners, and recently became a touching symbol of protest in the struggle to free the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
In Ron’s paintings, the pitas are seen floating against a neutral background, seemingly relieved of the cultural and political burdens that bind them to the local context. These, however, reverberate in the defamiliarization and distortion created by the extreme horizontality and the scorched hues of the blackened dough terrain, which, overshadowed by the dark clouds of the past year, are tainted in gloomy elegy.
Welcome Home / Come Home
14/3/2024 - 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.
