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Feature: Israeli museum holds exhibition on COVID-19 impact
From:Xinhua  |  2020-12-14 19:40

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by Keren Setton

JERUSALEM, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- The halls of the Haifa Museum of Art had been quiet in recent months. But over the weekend, it opened to visitors for the first time since Israel went into its second COVID-19 lockdown in September.

For those arriving, an exhibition about the global pandemic awaits. A chance to see different artistic interpretations of how the event dominated world headlines for much of 2020.

The display is a cluster of nine separate exhibitions entitled "Spaces in Turmoil." It focuses on how the pandemic has changed the concept of space. Lockdown, quarantine, and social distancing have become common words in the global vocabulary and the museum felt it needed to address this change.

"We wanted to do something special, to give some kind of answer to this pandemic that nobody could predict, and nobody could tell that something like this could happen," said Yotam Yakir, general director of the Haifa Museum. "It tells the story of what happened to us."

The different displays show the work of 50 different Israeli artists.

In Israel, it is the only museum to take on such a project. There is contemporary art, mixed media displays, still photography, and a room full of quickly changing memes, a social media expression form that became increasingly popular as Israelis looked for a humorous outlet during the lockdowns.

"The messages, like the virus itself, were infectious," reads the museum website describing the "Endless" exhibition that portrays the role of social media throughout the pandemic.

The global pandemic brought to the forefront of many other issues.

"You see here loneliness, you see here poverty, you see here violence in the family and all of these aspects that are all related to the pandemic, are all related to what happened to the entire world in the last year," Yakir told Xinhua.

The exhibition started in September and was forced to close because of the latest round of lockdown. The museum only reopened recently after the Israeli government scaled down lockdown measures. Enditem

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