Ein Harod: Four Exhibitions Across Israel’s Deep Divides

Iddo Markus

With their symbolic intensity, visual richness, and critical engagement, the four exhibitions opening on August 8 at the Ein Harod Art Center—each curated by Avi Lubin—offer a striking panorama of the Israeli art scene, spanning from historical figures like Bianca Eshel-Gershoni to emerging voices such as Didi Khalifa. Blending retrospective, personal theology, collective memory, and mythological reinterpretation, these exhibitions engage with the fractures of history, identity tensions, and alternative visions of the sacred, the political, and the human condition.

Bianca Eshel-Gershuni: A Pioneer Honored in Her First Retrospective

The exhibition dedicated to Bianca Eshel-Gershuni (1932–2020) represents a long-overdue but crucial act of recognition. This retrospective of an extraordinary multidisciplinary artist restores her work to the central place it deserves in the Israeli artistic narrative. Over a span of sixty years, Eshel-Gershuni developed a singular, hybrid, and often marginalized visual language, blending Christian symbols, religious iconography, decorative motifs, and autobiographical narratives.

Her art defies easy classification. A feminist who disavowed the label, a jeweler who subverted the conventions of her craft, an artist haunted by death yet asserting art as a celebration of life, she worked in the margins without ever conforming to dominant movements. Somewhere between the monumental and the miniature, the sacred and the intimate, her work explores the tension between the fragility of the body and the grandeur of mythical narrative. This retrospective reveals an uncompromisingly free artist, shaped by contradictions that she not only accepts but embraces—contradictions that lie at the very heart of her aesthetic.

Bianca Eshel-Gershuni

Assi Meshulam: Founding a Mystical and Subversive Order

With Daat Nahash HaKadmoni (The Spirit of the Ancient Serpent), Assi Meshulam presents his first major museum exhibition, twenty years after initiating his radical theological-artistic project. In 2005, with the publication of Ro’ekhem, he laid the foundations of an alternative mystical universe where the prophet Ro’ekhem—a hybrid half-man, half-dog figure—proclaims a new Torah infused with impurity, sexuality, and sacred disorder.

Since then, Meshulam has been building, piece by piece, a fictional religious order—the Order of the Impure—that feels both imaginary and disturbingly familiar. His work embraces contradiction: between paganism and monotheism, sanctity and impurity, violence and transcendence. In this exhibition, he takes a bold step forward, developing a visual vocabulary steeped in Kabbalah, biblical texts, and subverted liturgical objects. It opens with Jewish book covers from the Mishkan Judaica collection, then plunges into a symbolic world dense with signs, esoteric revelations, and implicit critiques of contemporary religiosity.

The tone is prophetic, yet always tinged with irony: Meshulam constructs a theology of chaos that mirrors the ancient world with today’s societal breakdowns, challenging the very foundations of the sacred.

Asi Meshulam

Iddo Markus: Fragmented Memory Between Archive and Expressive Painting

In Agent Orange, Iddo Markus offers a body of work rooted in collective trauma and visual memory. The title, borrowed from the toxic defoliant used during the Vietnam War, immediately sets the tone: one of invisible contamination, inherited wounds, and long-term destruction.

Marcus’s canvases are deconstructed, unfinished, marked by gesture and recurring figures—pregnant women, embracing couples, childhood scenes, or moments of dance. They evoke a fragmented, almost dreamlike narrative that juxtaposes surface tenderness with underlying despair.

Complementing the paintings are photographic enlargements from the artist’s personal archives—ordinary scenes stripped of their context. A look, a skeleton behind glass, a frozen gesture—each detail becomes disturbingly meaningful.

By confronting painting with photography, past with present, Marcus creates a visual language of loss and erasure—a search for meaning amid the emotional and historical chaos of a world in crisis.

Didi Khalifa: A Political Mythology on Greek Pottery

Didi Khalifa’s debut exhibition, Acropolis, tackles classical imagery in order to subvert it. Inspired by 5th-century BCE red-figure Greek ceramics, Khalifa—working in collaboration with ceramicist Noa Platt—creates amphorae, kylixes, and lekythoi that are infiltrated by unsettling contemporary elements.

Centaurs, symbols of wildness in Greek mythology, are transformed into “hilltop youth”—radical settlers from the Jewish messianic movement. Kippahs, tefillin, and sidecurls intrude upon ancient imagery, interrogating religious masculinity and political violence. Khalifa replays the contradictions of contemporary Israeli identity: between tradition and transgression, rootedness and rebellion.

His art holds up a mirror to Israeli society—a reflection of a youth caught between founding myths and unrestrained radicalism. Through the beauty of form and the brutality of its figures, he exposes the ambiguities of religious nationalism and the potential descent of heroism into fanaticism.

Didi Khalifa

Though distinct in form and intent, these four exhibitions are united by a common thread: an art that interrogates dominant narratives—whether historical, religious, or cultural. Through his bold and committed curatorship, Avi Lubin has orchestrated a program in which the works interweave around the themes of faith, power, the body, and history.

Bianca Eshel-Gershuni restores the voice of a long-marginalized woman. Assi Meshulam builds a critical theology. Iddo Markus reconstructs traumatic memory. Didi Khalifa confronts classical imagery with present-day violence.

Together, they offer a disquieting, essential map of our time. These exhibitions will take place at the Ein Harod Art Center until January 31, 2026.

Caroline Haïat