When Picasso Left the Museum : Choreographing Absence at Ein Harod

Choreography for a Collection © Kfir Bolotin

Why and how did works by Picasso leave the collections of an Israeli museum?This troubling yet revealing question lies at the heart of a new artistic project presented for a limited time at the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod in northern Israel. Titled Choreography for a Collection, this original creation by the international collective Public Movement, led by artist Dana Yahalomi, will be presented every weekend throughout the month of January.

Created specifically for the Mishkan and conceived as a critical homage to its history, the work is based on extensive research into the museum’s collections and the ideological, political, and symbolic decisions that have shaped their evolution since the 1950s.

Public Movement—known for performances in major institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the MAXXI in Rome, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art—examines the museum here not only as an exhibition space, but as a historical and political actor.

The performance focuses on the circulation of artworks: those that were acquired, exchanged, donated, or simply erased from official inventories. Among the cases addressed is that of original engravings by Pablo Picasso, relinquished in the 1950s in exchange for a work by the Jewish artist Maurycy Minkowski. At the time, this decision was grounded in the belief that the Mishkan had a particular mission: to preserve, highlight, and rescue Jewish art in the aftermath of the Shoah. In retrospect, this choice raises complex questions about the hierarchy of artistic values and the ideological role of the cultural institutions of the nascent State of Israel.

Choreography for a Collection © Kfir Bolotin

During the performance, four members of Public Movement guide the audience through the museum’s galleries. Through movement, posture, and physical presence, they embody works that are absent from the current collection. These “ghost” works, stripped of their materiality, reappear in a living, almost spectral form. The body becomes archive, memory, and medium of transmission—a living museum of what once was and is no longer.

The performance unfolds at the very heart of the exhibition spaces, in direct dialogue with the works on display. This proximity creates a striking tension between presence and absence, object and body, official history and repressed memory. The embodied works seem to haunt the walls of the Mishkan, silent witnesses to the choices, renunciations, and ideals that have shaped its identity.

Performances will take place on Fridays, January 9 and 30, and Saturdays, January 17 and 24. Each performance lasts approximately twenty minutes and is offered every half hour over several hours. Participation is intentionally limited to sixteen people per session, in order to preserve the intimacy and intensity of the experience.

Caroline Haïat