Exhibition | Hinterland

In the next few minutes, alerts are expected in your area. 

Cellphones erupt with messages; shatter the seeming routine. 

We are on the home front, not the battlefront. 
Yet, what does the home front actually know? What does it see? 
Do we know what is happening on the front, behind enemy lines? 
What makes up the image we have of the front? 
Do we want to look at it head on? To look away? To know? 

The home front is the civilian space in wartime that is directly affected by the political-state situation. It is supposedly located in the rear of the  active front, but has long since become a front of attack, death, trauma, and mental breakdown. The home front remains a place of grief and wounds not adequately processed or responded to and calls for a critical examination of power relations: who is recognized, who receives treatment and financial aid, which voices remain marginalized, unrepresented. In the home front are the physically and emotionally injured, the evacuees, the reservists on leave, everyone who is not behind enemy lines.

The works in the exhibition were created over the 2024–2025 academic year in various disciplines, many of them as part of the final projects for the undergraduate departments and master’s degree programs at Bezalel. They offer a portrait of the home front as a site for the creation of new images of identity, memory, belonging, and disconnection; as a place where the border between the personal and the political body and between private and public awareness is not clear-cut. They reflect an identity-in-the-making that is constructed and breaks due to uncertainty and unending disaster. They represent a portrait of a society in limbo, torn between the home front and the frontline, between the periphery and center, between interior and exterior. From a state of instability–political, psychological, environmental–emerge works that reveal the conflicting layers of an immensely fractured reality and unbearable loss of life. 

Curators:
Prof. Adi Stern, President of Bezalel 
Ilanit Konopny, Head of Curatorial Studies in the Master’s Program in Policy and Theory of the Arts 

Presenters:
Shmuel Apter, Bar Barzilay, Tom Bichovsky, Yael Bonne, Tamir Chen, Noga Davis, Maia Duniec, Omer Dushy, Topaz Gez, Kfir Goldenberg, Noa Israeli, Noga Kamhaji, Ivan Kobrin, Nitzan Mileguir, Yehuda Ofman, Chaya Rizel, Noa Rothenstein, May Sahar, Mariam Shqerat, Keren Ziv, Naomi Zilbershtein.

July 30 - October 16, 2025
Clore Arts and Design Gallery
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus, 1 Zmora St., Jerusalem