How do permanent local art exhibitions in major museums in Israel reflect the current reality, and is that even their role? The essay examines the special case of “Material Imagination,” the exhibition of an Israeli collection that opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2022.
This case invites a reexamination of the intersection between the work of art, with its free materials and visions, and the institutional space, whose collections and curatorial practices are frequently influenced by historical academic knowledge. Such an examination is linked to fundamental questions of critical museology from recent decades, and in particular, questions concerning the role of museums in the construction of national narratives and the challenging of alternative collective identities. But preferring the material prism over a historical one in shaping the attitudes toward a work of art and its connection to other works – an approach implemented by curator Dalit Matatyahu in “Material Imagination” – sends museological criticism to other realms in order to more intensely feel the diverse emanations of local art from the burning and crumbling areas surrounding it at the present moment.
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