The exhibition “Haunting” concludes a group process of nine artists and two curators studying together about and with ghosts. The exhibition joins a short international history of exhibitions inspired by the spectral turn that began with Jacques Derrida’s book The Ghosts of Marx (1993).
Through reading theory, virtual meetings in the group’s studio, games, rituals, and conversations about life experiences, the artists and curators of the exhibition gathered and composed a language for speaking with ghosts. The title “Haunting", chosen in active language rather than haunted, stems from the choice to try to stay with the ghosts and not immediately expel them, to agree to listen to them from personal and collective traumas, and from what the artists tried and failed to forget, repress, or remain silent about. The embodiment of spirits in the material and works presented in the exhibition offers the possibility of weaving the past-present-future of the artists differently, expanding their scope of action and resistance.
Participants in the exhibition include Laila Abd Elrazaq, Raghad Sawaed, Maia Duniec, Omer Peri, Gal Levinson, Din Bar, Malak Manzour, Aisha Kadri, Michaela Winefield Fleishman. The curator is Maya Bamberger, together with associate curator Adi Lam.
Exhibition curator Maya Bamberger stated, "The 'Haunting' exhibition is a kind of shared laboratory in which we try out new tools. We also met during very charged moments in the past year that were not easy for the participants, a very mixed group of young artists – Arabs, Bedouin, Druze, Jewish, and we read a theory about ghosts. Ghosts as the embodiment of what we have repressed and forgotten and killed and that haunt us – whether it is real dead people from our history, or personal, family or collective thoughts and feelings. The choice of ghosts is related to the feeling that the scope for action during the war was terribly limited and out of the belief that perhaps ghosts from history have something to teach us to enable us to do something."