Twice As Good: Tours of Two Exhibitions on Tuesdays / On Drawing: A visit to the exhibitions Netta Lieber Sheffer: Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken and Hold Everything Dear (in Hebrew)

This is an unusual tour of two exhibitions comprising exclusively paper-based works—one involving large-scale drawings and the other prints and drawings from the Museum’s collection. Works created on paper have a special quality. The paper allows for delicate, often intimate and lyrical expression. Both exhibitions touch very lightly upon the complexities of Israeli reality. Netta Lieber Sheffer offers alternatives to the existence of the Jewish people, while the exhibition Hold Everything Dear features works donated to the museum by artists and collectors who had fled for their lives from the Nazis in search of a place of refuge.

Hold Everything Dear unfolds as a field of conflicting images about memory and oblivion, in the face of loss, death, or displacement. Many of the works tell the story of artists persecuted by the Nazi authorities, including those denounced as “degenerate artists,” whose work, according to the Nazis, was “an offence to German feelings.” This renewed examination of the drawing and print collection reflects the need to hold on to precious “remnants” that harbor hope for resurrection and a secure future.

Conversely, Netta Lieber Sheffer’s exhibition engages with past paths of Jewish existence, by revisiting key historical junctures in the issue of Jewish identity and settlement before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Through monumental charcoal drawings of boats floating in an empty space, bearing figures and symbols from the past, Lieber Sheffer traces ideas that have been cast aside, such as Herzl’s utopian vision of the Jewish State; Diaspora as an ideology in the vision of the Jewish Bund movement; the aspiration to return to a biblical way of life while disregarding two thousand years of exile; the Canaanite attempt to connect the Jewish nation to the local region based on the notion of an ancient Hebraic identity; and a reexamination of the roots of the links between Judaism, Mizrahi identity, and Arab identity.

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Note: This tour is in Hebrew only.
Tours led by educators.
The number of participants is limited | Advance reservations are required for all participants.
The tour takes place near a secure space.
Participation in the tour includes entrance ticket to the Museum.