Now in blue: Museum exhibits first works by Be’eri artist Ziva Jelin since October 7
Gaza-border kibbutz painter known for large red landscapes, which took bullets during Hamas invasion; ‘What the Heart Wants, Art as a Gateway to Healing’ opens in Ramat Gan
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Like many other Israeli museums in the last 15 months, the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art looked for a way to explore the pain and healing since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.
Its latest set of exhibits, “What the Heart Wants, Art as a Gateway to Healing,” February 7 through June 30, presents four exhibits and two artist walls that offer both direct and indirect views of the attack and subsequent war.
It was an idea that had occurred to lead curator Sari Golan before October 7, as she thought about trauma and its effect on Israeli society.
“Sometimes you have to touch the wound in order to heal,” said Golan during a tour of the exhibits.
The lead exhibit in the three-floor museum is “Cypress Shadows on the Road,” a strong, emotional solo show of works by Ziva Jelin, an artist from Kibbutz Be’eri whose husband, former MK Haim Jelin, emerged as a kind of spokesman in the first days after the massacre in their community.
Be’eri’s art gallery, which Jelin had established, was destroyed by the Hamas terrorists, who put bullet holes through her canvases and burned the building to the ground.
The Ramat Gan exhibit is Jelin’s first show since then, and it includes past works as well as a new collection that she painted in the last 15 months.
Jelin is known for large-scale landscapes of Be’eri — cypresses and roads, homes and buildings — that in the past were saturated in red.
“I never felt any need to paint any place other than Be’eri,” said Jelin, who was present at the tour of the exhibit. “Everything I need is in Be’eri.”
In the wake of the assault, when the Hamas terrorists invaded Be’eri, murdering entire families, burning people in their homes and taking 32 people hostage, Jelin said they also stole the shade of red from her.
The bullet holes in those canvases — which have now been hung in several Israeli museums over the last 15 months, including Ramat Gan — helped her create distance from them.
Her newest collection of paintings are saturated in blue, and they form a portrait of what Kibbutz Be’eri looks like now.
They depict the public buildings and destroyed homes — including her own gallery — as well as the perimeter road that was used by the terrorists, and quotidian objects like plastic chairs on a lawn.
The intensity of personal experience apparent in Jelin’s works continues in the upstairs group exhibit inspired by the works of artist Uri Katzenstein.
Katzenstein, a visual artist and sculptor who died in 2018, drew on a range of materials in his works, many of which were influenced by his upbringing as the only child of German Jews who escaped to Israel before the Holocaust, and by his service as a combat medic in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Curator Ronit Eden brought in other artists whose works were influenced by Katzenstein, by his attention to issues of post-trauma stress and relief, as well as his thoughts about family, gender and non-binary people.
“In this exhibit, you see someone who was affected by the traumas of life, by parents from the Holocaust generation and the Yom Kippur War, and what it did to him and what it may do to this generation,” said Eden.
There’s a sense of being cushioned from trauma in Adva Drori’s “Queen of Sorrow” exhibit, a sensory experience that invites visitors to take off their shoes and feel the cushiony fake grass that carpets the exhibit, or to sit in the crocheted swings and felted wool bean bags that make up parts of the immersive installation.
On the other side of the gallery wall is “Persona and Shadow,” in which curator Dina Yakerson, who was born in St. Petersburg, takes the opportunity to dive into the works of Russian artists from the Maria and Mikhail Zeitlin collection by comparing and contrasting them with the rich oil portraits of Ran Tenenbaum, who often paints people who are close to him.
“It’s all the hidden parts of us that we don’t want to identify with,” said Yakerson.
“What the Heart Wants, Art as a Gateway to Healing,” February 7 through June 30 at the Ramat Gan Museum.
