Designs on Holon

Five fascinating exhibitions in galleries around town launch the design season in ‘the city of sand’.

By BARRY DAVIS
Papier Maché doll 521 (photo credit: Matan Lieberman)
Papier Maché doll 521
(photo credit: Matan Lieberman)
November with the “Butterflies in the Tummy” show of miniature works at Meirov House, through to the Israeli Fashion exhibition at the same venue next March, which provides an overview of the development of the local industry in the 1960s-1980s.
The season opening fivesome includes the “Pass Forward” show at Hachavah Gallery. It provides an intriguing look at the cumulative creative effect of sequential inspiration.
The exhibition features items created by professionals from a wide range of disciplines, with each artist feeding off the work of the previous link in the design chain. Participants in the exhibition include ceramics and glass designer Batia Malka, wood artist Ohad Milner, rock singer Maya Herman, poet Roni Somek and dress designer Omri Goren Over at The Theater Gallery, Natan Elkanovich’s “Childhood Memories” exhibition features pop art-based works that combine to produce a high-relief image on canvas with fashion accessories embedded in it. The creation is based on pictures from Elkanovich’s own photograph album and conveys the artist’s yearning for his long lost infancy.
The “Below the Belt” exhibition at the Chenkin Gallery, curated by Ruti Liobin, presents a series of works by female artists who explore the aesthetic and social properties of trousers using a variety of creative techniques, and through the prism of their own life experiences. The items in the show examine issues relating to control, power, exploitation and authority as depicted in an item of clothing which, although long wrested from the sole domain of the male, still arouses masculine associations.
The “Read the Walls” (Likro Kirot) extramural slot of the opening design event, on Dov Hoz Boulevard, offers a glimpse of the external changes that took place in Paris during the Nazi occupation of 1941-45. The show includes images of some of the 1,000 buildings dotted around the French capital that bear stone plaques that act as testament to some of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on Parisians – including Jews – during World War II.
As the city’s name implies (hol means “sand” in Hebrew), Holon was largely built on sandy terrain, and the “From Sands to Holon” (Meholot Le’Holon) show, curated by Ayelet Biran, examines the subject of sand ahead of the planned creation of the local Sand Park.
The exhibition embraces an extensive array of aspects relating to sand, from perpetuity to transience, roaming and permanence, interior and exterior, and the hidden and revealed. The contributing artists, from various areas of design and art, include industrial designer Nir Meiri, painter and installation artist Shuli Bornstein Wolf, and architects Kush Parekh from California and Nitzan Set and Shilo Yohai.
Other shows planned for the rest of the season include the January show “Japan Is Here,” which marks the first anniversary of the tsunami in Japan. It is couple with an international poster design exhibition, the “January Dismantling, Assembling and More” slot with works provided by the Ariel Design and Technology Center’s Department of Industrial Design. In March, the “Animal Farm” exhibition will feature zoological forms in pottery and glass.

Saturday’s exhibitions are free to the public. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.

For more information: Chenkin Gallery (03) 559-0021; Hachavah Gallery (03) 559-6590; Meirov House (03) 651-6851; The Theater Gallery (03) 502-3001-3.

The ‘Read the Walls’ exhibition will take place on Dov Hoz Boulevard between the Ayalon Freeway and Struma Square.