City on Troubled Waters

A city is written over and over again. Every new building shares its site with the ghost of its predecessor; the debris of demolition is cleared from the location but not from memory, and every private story joins the unfolding urban narrative. The city’s history continues to operate on the surface and beneath it, inscribed in buildings, street layouts, infrastructure, and the movement of bodies.
Tel Aviv-Yafo grew out of ideas of a new beginning, yet it was built upon land that already carried memories, lives and traces. The city has since continued to oscillate between construction and erasure, vision and disillusionment, belonging and displacement.
It changes its face constantly, but beneath the new visage the old one still remains, refusing to be erased. The artists participating in the exhibition observe the city through the materials that compose it:  Styrofoam aspiring to be stone, broken tiles cast up by the sea, threads tracing memory, water flowing below the streets, archival images emerging into the present. Thus, with these materials, the city is recreated through acts of collecting, dismantling, repairing and assembling.
The “Trubled Waters” in the exhibition’s title serve as a reminder of deep-seated social and political currents—of the persistent instability that is the very nature of the city: an entity that any attempt to stabilize is, at best, temporary. After all, constant movement is the foundation of its existence. Within this movement, home, memory, and identity ceaselessly shift and transform, and the city itself is revealed as an ongoing negotiation between past, present, and future.

Curator: Nir Hramat
Opening: November 13, 2026

Artists