In February 2022, a group of ten women artists and one male artist gathered at the Art Center in Givat Haviva for a shared journey of exploration, learning, and the creation of a personal and social portrait within the framework of the program “A River from Eden.”

The ten women artists and one artist ‘leapt’ into their personal “river,” and over the course of six months drew from it memories, stories, insights, thoughts, dilemmas, and dreams that were translated into line, color, and form.

The beginning of every journey is always accompanied by a sense of curiosity, uncertainty, and at times even concern.
Every journey begins from a starting point — a present that has a past and likely also a future.

The point of departure we chose originates from one river, a shared story that connects us all, a story that provides context, meaning, identity, and purpose.

“And a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided and became four heads.”
(Genesis 2:10)

Four rivers emerge from Eden, flowing across the globe for thousands of years, branching into streams, brooks, lakes, swamps, canals, and seas. Each river is one story within a vast tapestry of countless stories, chapters, thoughts, memories, opinions, questions, people, events, and places. Together, they hold within them an entire culture.

Yet in contemporary reality, as individuals and as a society, it seems that we have stopped looking at our rich shared cultural treasure. Instead, we focus on fractures and divisions, on a discourse that is largely based on the written and spoken word — an available and immediate means of expression, yet one that is sometimes careless.

Through the language of art, “A River from Eden” seeks to explore and reveal personal and social stories that live within communities and drive their cultures. It aims to retell them differently through present action, to bring stories together, to gather and archive them anew, to make them accessible, and to open the shared outcome to re-mix, inviting response and collective curation, again and again.

The artistic work was created in the time between meetings, drawing inspiration from textual and visual study around various themes: place and belonging, memory and forgetting, significant figures in our lives, walls and boundaries, journeys and migration, and more. We sought to make use of the artists’ ability to create new perspectives for themselves and for wider circles — reflections that allow a more open and flexible observation than spoken words or written agendas. Through artistic creation, we wished to give the stories tangible presence, to enable encounter and deeper familiarity, and to generate dialogue and response.

The exhibition “And Many Rivers Flow from It” is the outcome of a deep, engaging, challenging, creative, and meaningful working process by ten women artists and one male artist. It offers a glimpse into personal stories that came together to form a new, complete collective story — one whose essence, as Dana Arieli writes, lies in its parts.

Adi Nachshon, Limor Shiponi

Curatorial Text

Opening: Saturday, 9.8.23
Venue: Givat Haviva Art Gallery
Curator: Zvika Altman
Exhibition closing: 27.8.23

Events within the Exhibition

Gallery Talk: 27.8.22

Exhibition page in Hebrew | Exhibition page in Arabic