(Israel Ministry of Tourism)

A new exhibition entitled “Woven Consciousness” is set to open at the Eretz Israel Museum on February 17, 2014. The exhibition looks at contemporary textile work in Israel, which has been flourishing in recent years despite the collapse of the local textile industry. This is by virtue of the advanced textile studies in Israel’s higher education institutions, the success of independent textile designers who cooperate with companies and artists in Israel and abroad, and by virtue of the artists for whom textile is their main way of expressing poetics and fantasy.

The exhibit brings together the work of 59 textile designers, visual artists, and multidisciplinary creators, reflecting the central part which textile plays in the search for new, rigorous, and revolutionary paths for expression and practical use in the world of design and art, and the way in which its boundaries are examined and breached from time to time. The exhibit offers ways of observation along dimensions of time and space as these are perceived in textile, overt and covert ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural aspects embodied in it, and the way in which textile is woven into our consciousness as both substance and abstraction.

Textile is one of the main elements in everyday life; it covers, protects and ornaments. It is a shape and a pre-shape, a practical object such as clothing, furniture, space – and at the same time a sensorial transitional substance that flows endlessly, relating narratives and visual traditions and offering new aesthetic possibilities.

Textile is composed of a web of natural or manmade fibers created in a multitude of methods – weaving, knitting, tying, felting, compression, and more – some of which are as ancient as mankind and some are the cutting edge of the 21st century science. Today, alongside the cotton, wool, straw, linen, silk, canvas and jute fibers one finds nylon, polyester, Lycra, metal, glass, steel and carbon fibers. Textile fuels the imagination of designers, artists, and scientists as it is flexible and durable, soft, rough, and two- and three-dimensional. It combines the labor-intensive handmade endeavor and industrialized technology.

The Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, is a multidisciplinary museum that focuses on the history and culture of Israel through comprehensive permanent and temporary exhibits in the diverse fields of archeology, ethnography, post and philately, folklore, Judaica, traditional crafts, and popular art, cultural history, and local identity. The museum, one of the largest in Israel, is spread over an area of some 20 acres, and comprises about 15 buildings and various installations. Hundreds of thousands of items are housed in the diverse museum collections, among them numerous and rare treasures.

In addition to the ten permanent exhibitions and ancient sites, the museum displays about 20 temporary exhibits every year, and also conducts symposiums, lectures and meetings with curators and scholars in various fields. The museum site also houses an innovative planetarium, halls of various sizes, lecture rooms and workshops, a cafeteria, and a gift shop.