Paul Curran | 12 Stations of Tel Aviv, 2026

Tel Aviv, as envisioned by Paul Curran, unfolds as a vertical cross section of a city built through the continual excavation of its own past. In drawers beneath the surface are the memories of twelve neighborhoods, depicted in Japanese sumi ink drawings, alongside archaeological layers and fragments of everyday life. Above them stand two Tel Avivs, existing side by side: the city above, white, growing, and ambitious, and the city below, excavated, exposed, and ever changing. The light rail cuts through both, transforming an infrastructural wound into a new network of movement, encounter, and memory.

Within these layers appears Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish state and author of Altneuland (“Old New Land”). Nahum Sokolow gave the Hebrew translation the name “Tel Aviv,” later adopted as the name of the first Hebrew city. In Curran’s installation, Herzl’s vision of the future meets the city that has become reality, continually changing and building its future.