Exhibitions

The exhibition A Black Flag in a Red City illuminates a chapter in the history of Haifa's Wadi Salib neighborhood, the social implications of which are absent from most of the urban and national "spaces of memory." The exhibition focuses on the voices of the residents of Wadi Salib in the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting a personal and collective memory of urban history written "from below." Using exclusively visual means, the exhibition presents experiences of marginality, injustice, and exclusion, alongside the development of a diverse and lively social fabric. This reality fostered processes of social organization and resistance, climaxing in the protests of July 1959.

In the 1950s, a number of professional photographers were active in Haifa. Some worked for local institutions and government bodies. Amiram Erev (the “Solel Boneh Photography Studio”) and Moshe Gross (the “Keren Or” studio), for example, documented the period’s bustling industries and massive surge of construction. Alongside Arav and Gross, photographers passing through the city — such as Boris Carmi and Zoltan Kruger — commemorated its unique views.

The term "public housing" elicits a clear image: uniform buildings three or four stories high, arranged in a row, dating from the 1950s and 1960s. In Israeli films from the 1980s, public housing serves as the backdrop of the remote, neglected places known as "the other Israel." These disregarded towns, situated far from the country's center, are populated mostly by Mizrahi Jews and feature a monotonous urban landscape.

The Rambam Hospital, previously a British government hospital, has been serving the residents of Haifa and the north of Israel for the past century. The hospital was founded by the British Mandate government, for the use of all of the city's residents: British, Arabs, and Jews as one. It is no accident that this institution was built in Haifa's Lower City, near the port, the train station, and in the center of the beating heart of Haifa at that time.

The dramatic change undergone by Haifa in the 1948 war still resonates in the city's urban space, its buildings, residents, and cultural-historic climate. This exhibition seeks to present the many aspects of that fateful year.

The current exhibition examines different ways of classifying and constructing a historical collection, and the differing interpretations of the field's leading "actors": the collector, the curator, and the historian. It reflects different ways of presenting and interpreting a collection: scientific means of classification and cataloging ("typology"), a theme-oriented division into meta-categories, interpretations that rely on an academic approach or on non-theoretical writing, and more. These interpretations represent a multiplicity of views of the "historical truth

. The show seeks to create a sequence of Haifa views – beginning with the old postcards and ending with contemporary photographs taken using a smartphone and Instagram filters. The medium has changed over the years, but the same iconic viewpoints have remained attractive and are now disseminated to the entire world. The Instagram photos, presented in the exhibition space alongside the cards, thereby acquire a new and unexpected meaning.

Aviv Itzhaky (b. 1949) is a photographer born in Haifa. In the 1970s and 1980s he travelled between Haifa, Jerusalem, and Paris, experiencing the changes undergone by the Jewish community in Israel and in France in those years. During this period he created an impressive and comprehensive body of work depicting the urban environments in which he lived and the wealth of forms he found there.

The collections of Dr. Yirmiyahu Rimon (born in Haifa, 1933-2018), constituting one of the largest and most important private collections on the history of Palestine and Zionism, are the product of decades of enthusiastic and diligent collectorship. They bring to mind Walter Benjamin's definition, in an essay on collecting (in The Flaneur), of the collector as a courageous rebel, collecting objects not for their utilitarian value but rather according to their beauty and the memories they evoke.

This exhibition was created following the acquisition of the Rimon Collection by the Haifa Museums – a step that introduced a large private collection into the museum space. The exhibition addresses the tension between the "private collection" and the "museum collection" in the diverse