Global Art and the Museum

MoBY | Museums of Bat Yam is a complex of three museums, offering a wide platform for cultural research, theory, and criticism. Located by the sea and not far from Tel Aviv, MoBY can be considered both as a center for contemporary art and a community museum of an unusual type, as it is intended to link several local communities.

The museums complex

Ben Ari Museum of Contemporary Art

The museum was built in 1964, by the architect Isaac Perlshtein. Two stories high and topped by a glass roof, it consists of 935 square meters of round architecture, inspired by the adjacent water tower. In the past few years Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art has undergone a thorough re-configuration and it is now among the leading contemporary art museums in Israel. The museum’s curatorial staff offers a fresh outlook on contemporary art, and experiments with up to date approaches to art exhibition and education. The museum hosts temporary exhibitions of international contemporary art and holds an ever growing permanent collection of contemporary and modern artworks.

Ryback House

Named after the Russian-French artist Issachar Ryback, the museum holds the largest collection of the artist’s paintings, drawings and sculptures. The museum further accommodates MoBY’s growing collection of contemporary art and functions as a center for education and community activities.

Sholem Asch’s Home

The original home of acclaimed Yiddish writer Sholem Asch contains an extraordinary collection of manuscripts, modern art, judaica, documentations, photographs. Upon its upcoming re-opening, the museum will host projects, exhibitions and literary events.

SIGNALS, Installation view, Ira Eduardovna, The Princess or the Tiger, 2010

Mission

MoBY promotes experimental approaches to art, curatorial practice and education, initiates exchanges with peer institutions and engages in an on-going dialogue with various local communities. Over the past three years, the new managing staff has set up an interesting agenda of international exhibitions, public programs and academic conferences accompanied by researched catalogues and other publications.

MoBY Hosting, Opening Night, 2008

Acitivities

The core of MoBY’s activities, the museum hosts international exhibitions of contemporary art and presents its permanent sculpture collection. The museum’s yearly activities include four large-scale exhibitions organized by in-house and guest curators, frequent public program’s events, conferences and education /community projects. In addition to curatorial essays and images, the MoBY catalogues include articles by prominent international scholars, whose translation into Hebrew renders them accessible to Israeli art professional and art lovers, and enriches the local discourse on a wide range of subjects.

Island, Sharon Glazberg, Agri-Culture, 2010

The collection

MoBY’S collection, gathered from bequests, gifts, and acquisitions, includes works of Issachar Ryback, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, Jean-François Millet as well as a selection of prominent works from recent decades. Since the Museum’s re-configuration in August 2007 the collection has benn enlarged by the addition of paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, installations, and video works by contemporary artists, among them Jordan Wolfson, Jan Tichy, Zbigniew Rogalski, Batsheva Ross, Société Réaliste, Know Hope, Gil & Moti, Guy Goldstein, and others.

MoBY +

“MoBY+” is the museum’s public program. It makes use of the museum’s space and the surrounding public space to expand the range of themes and ideas presented to the public. This program welcomes the general public to participate in a range of regularly scheduled events that offer opportunities for discussion and various forms of collaboration. This program furthers MoBY’s cultural and community-outreach agenda, and encourages critical discussion and a public exchange of ideas.

Anticipation Time, Opening night, installation view, 2010

Conferences

Once a year, the MoBY staff organizes a conference that examines questions central to contemporary art and culture. Speakers include prominent artists, curators, critical thinkers and scholars working in a range of disciplines.

“Video Exposure”

“Video Exposure” is a public screening of specially curated video compilations. The screenings take place on the public loan surrounding the museum and are open to all, with free admission. “Video Exposure” is intended as an opportunity for cultural exchange, in accordance with MoBY’s interest in the intersection of art and the public sphere. Other institutions and organizations are regularly invited to collaborate in mutual screenings, creating an active network of migrating video art compilations.

Video Marina, Nira Pereg, 67 Bows, 2006

Future Programs

Forum

“Forum” is a wide ranged conference which discusses possible and imagined exhibitions for the 21st century. It is organized as long term collaboration with HaMidrasha Art School and various scholars from around the world. This conference will be accompanied by a printed publication, which will feature edited versions of the lecture and additional contents, and will be distributed online, locally, and internationally.

Spoiler

“Spoiler” is a multi-disciplinary event that offers creators in various fields the opportunity to experiment with new materials in the presence of an audience, while offering viewers the opportunity to encounter works-in-progress in various fields – art, music, literature, dance, and more.

The Community and Education Department

The department explores new approaches to art education and community outreach, while developing innovative programs for introducing contemporary art featured at the Museum to the heterogeneous range of populations living in Bat Yam. The Museum is intent on playing a significant and influential role in community life. This intention has given rise to a series of projects that attempt to expand the Museum’s impact on public life, and to encourage a dialogue between the art institution and the general public. The Museum’s community-outreach projects were all planned after a period of comprehensive research concerning the needs of the target audiences, and in full collaboration with them.

Education & Community, A Night in the Museum, 2009

Selected project: Art in the Public Sphere

In collaboration with the Jewish-Arab Center, Jaffa

Bat Yam and Jaffa are neighboring cities that form a continuous urban expanse, and even share the same main street – known as “Border Street.” The area connecting the south of Jaffa to the north of Bat Yam is inhabited by a population composed of Jews, Muslims and Christians. Yet despite their physical proximity, these three populations hardly entertain any form of cultural or social exchange. One of the expressions of the self-imposed isolation of each community, and their reservations concerning the neighboring communities may be found in the offensive graffiti on the streets connecting the two cities, where confrontations sometimes explode into physical violence. Within the framework of this unique project – a collaboration between MoBY and the Jewish-Arab Center in Jaffa – a mixed group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian adolescents will come together to study the unique practice of graffiti art ,and its aesthetic, social and political potential as a tool for communication in the public sphere.