Kibbutz is sometimes an address sometimes home

Dov Heller

Aviv Atzili

Haim Maor 

Tamar Nissim 

"When you open the door and go out into nature, you are not necessarily better, but there is a little more truth. I am in the Negev region and I have the feeling of being more involved in nature […] I am connected to a battery called a kibbutz, and for me a kibbutz is sometimes nature and landscape." (Dov Heller in a radio interview with Yuval Meskin, 1981). 

"What's the problem?" -  

The late Aviv Atzili with a characteristic smile and a characteristic attitude to Shimon ben Shabat (owner of Raw Art Gallery) when the latter came to look for metal parts in garages and found a talented artist who is actually a mechanic. 

How do you even approach this 'event' called a kibbutz?  

How can a person or people embrace such an idea and still live with it, and still want to live with it? 

After all, it is almost illogical and inhumane to live next to, within and for an idea. 

It makes almost no sense to live contrary to contemporary thought and contemporary zeitgeist and what is conventionally accepted.  

How, then?  

What is a kibbutz? 

Initially, a kibbutz is people who have an idea. Then it is people who take action.  

First, an idea of ​​people who decide that ​​living together and facing life together is a good idea.  

Then a kibbutz is made. A kibbutz is established, and becomes a reality. People make a home, they think “home”. 

And what is art? 

Art is first an idea, then an action. 

First, the idea of an artist who decides that art for them is the way of communicating with other people, and that making art is their way of living in the world. 

Then they paint, sculpt, make a print. They document, edit, make a movie – they bring art into the home and into the world. 

After one hundred years of kibbutz – what, and who, is a kibbutz made of? 

It is made of people. Of ideas. Of thoughts. Of differences. 

The exhibition Kibbutz is sometimes an address, sometimes home is the last one in the series of exhibitions on the theme of kibbutz at the Givat Haviva Art Gallery for the year 2025.  

This exhibition offered us the opportunity to closely experience the encounter and the combination of art, kibbutz and life - and an approach to life. 

The idea and the action were cast in Dov Heller, soldered, stamped and engraved in him; The home is an address and the home is a kibbutz and the kibbutz is an address.  

A kibbutz in the Western Negev region means wide fields, agriculture and a distant horizon, sunny and dusty.  

And it means kibbutz life, and kibbutz holidays, and border and water and family and much more. 

Likewise, in the works of Dov Heller there is a faithful representation of life within the kibbutz that sanctifies an idea and action through art, whether it is in his prints, his paintings, his sculptures, whether in the political actions or in the exhibitions he organized at the dairy; This is also the case with the connections he made, including the connection with Aviv Atzili - a connection of allies, neighbors-partners to the horizon of the fields of the Western Negev, allies to the idea and action of the kibbutz, and also partners in art. 

Dov Heller was not a romantic in his approach. In his art he managed to express the hardships and the crises, the proximity to the border, the horizon of the fields and the dust, the soil and the sweat, criticism and ideology. 

He touched them and made them an integral part of his life, of the kibbutz and of his art. 

A glimpse into Dov Heller's works is a glimpse into another era. One where you can care for others, for the weak, for those who speak another language, without being denounced and ostracized. It is a glimpse into a time when people also spoke a different language and artists dared to speak in an abstract and conceptual language. 

Life, work and the joy from the simplicity they provide were woven into the late Aviv Atzili, in his person and in his works, which he created in his kibbutz on scraps of metal or plastic he collected. 

Atzili painted in the openings that he felt the time allowed him - between taking care of the tractors and taking care of his family. And he didn't make a big deal of it, he just did. He just drew and smiled, and just fixed tractors and probably also fixed farmers on the way…. When he was invited to exhibit at Kibbutz Nirim, he did. And when he sold works of art as easily as he tuned an engine – he did.  And he didn't make a big deal. He made art and solved problems, or in his words - 'What's the problem?' The power of his art is the power of the simple things – they express the power of joy and creativity, and now also the power of unrelenting longing. 

The gap between the kibbutz collective idea and reality, life itself, is perceived differently by different people. It is precisely this gap, and the need to emphasize it, refine it and conduct a dialogue about it, that Haim Maor refers to in his work Dissolving Myths (1979-80).  

Maor places a mirror in front of the kibbutz collective idea and creates a conversation about the meaning of being different within a unifying idea. He asks us to look at what is happening by the fence, to look at the margins, those inside and outside the kibbutz, and to be able to see them. To see and embrace this difference. The Other, the one we are not so comfortable looking at. The ability to see and include requires attention, patience and tolerance, knowing how to stretch your boundaries, your fence, in order to accommodate the Other - this is what Haim Maor asked of the kibbutz in 1979 and this is what he is asking of us now.  

Tamar Nissim’s video installation, Whose mourning is it anyway?  Shows the members of the kibbutzim who returned to their homes, following many months of living as refugees after their kibbutz was occupied or evacuated in past wars, and had to deal with the private bereavement of the orphans and widows, as well as the collective mourning of the kibbutz community.  

The testimonies reflect feelings of guilt among the survivors and painful emotions among the orphans and widows who were not treated at the time. The preoccupation with the consequences of the historical trauma and its long-term effect on the kibbutz community, also echoes the reality of dozens of kibbutzim this year, and the path that must be taken to address the collective trauma of each community. 

The video work is shown in a projection space for a single viewer, in a confession booth where the characters tell their personal stories.   

The work employes the Pepper's Ghost technique, a hologram based on an optical illusion that allows the characters to be simultaneously seen as present and as ghosts from the past, a past that is still haunting and highlights the impact that traumatic events have on the community as a whole. 

Atar Geva, Exhibition Curator