This is the third time that Yoram Blumenkrantz is exhibiting at the Benyamini Gallery. As he notes, all three exhibitions were site-specific installations that accumulate meaning in relation to the story of his life and his trajectory as someone who grew up and was educated in south Tel Aviv—the very area in which the Benyamini Center is located. With the exhibition 7061/83, Blumenkrantz’s installations over the years form a trilogy that relates to the geographical location of the Benyamini Center, a building situated opposite his childhood neighborhood and his parents’ home in the Shapira neighborhood.
7061/83 designates the block and parcel number of the building. By using it, Blumenkrantz marks a location detached from context, a kind of “blank slate” upon which he places his works. Yet the artworks infuse the space with the identity- and culture-laden contexts through which he developed as a person and as an artist, breathing meaning and associations into this supposedly neutral site.
His previous two works shown at the Center also linked identity and place. In Benyamini Lookout, presented in the exhibition Concrete Bulimia curated by Tali Tamir, Blumenkrantz built a partition on the rooftop of the building using thin concrete slabs arranged like an Israeli-style shutter, alongside concrete cast into large tin cans and barbed wire. The partition redirected the gaze toward the neighborhood of his youth, while simultaneously interrupting the visual field. This gesture addressed questions of power relations and demographic, economic, and cultural shifts in the area between Kiryat HaMelacha and the Shapira neighborhood—connected by a short aerial line. ¹
Benyamini Cascades, the second work in the series, was shown in the exhibition Terracotta Rave, curated by Shlomit Bauman², accompanied by a performance. The work explored the tension between the artificial and the natural, the local and the imported, life and death. Both works begin with material as metaphor: in one case (concrete), power dynamics are examined as human-made constructs (architecture and social structures); in the other (terracotta), examined through the relationship between humans and nature.
In 7061/83, Blumenkrantz destabilizes the power relations between the art object and the collection of cheap domestic waste materials, tin cans, beer bottles, remnants of fencing, and the like. These gesture toward society’s margins, as he himself notes: “as testimony and traces of existence at the edges of place and time, like the homeless, drug users, and trafficked women who fill the backyard of the State of Israel.” South Tel Aviv is a microcosm of social invisibility.
Growing up in the Shapira neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s, he and his friends would wander beyond the safe residential zones into Kiryat HaMelacha, the Muslim cemetery of Sheikh Murad, the courtyards of the Russian Church, the Histadrut Forest (now Park HaHorshot), and the ruins of Abu Kabir on the way to Jaffa—areas untouched then by urban planning. Between the poisonous castor plants that grew wild across south Tel Aviv and the meticulously kept gardens of senior Histadrut members who received state housing in the nearby Kiryat Shalom neighborhood, Blumenkrantz’s return as an adult artist to the Benyamini Gallery marks a complex reality: on the one hand, a return to childhood memories characterized by unconscious, free wandering through these spaces; and on the other, an expression of a later, critical, clear-sighted view of the cultural and planning shifts—and their lasting impact on the lives and status of the disadvantaged communities³ of south Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
The exhibition reflects Blumenkrantz’s profound personal and social awareness as an artist and educator⁴. Through improvisation and the use of negligible materials, he undermines the status of the art object, creating one-off installations that can be reused, reproduced, discarded, or dismantled and rebuilt. His practice moves between past and present, between memory and reality, aspiration and ruin, high and low—or, as he puts it: between “canon and castor plant.” ⁵ Doing so, he subverts the social order and seeks to create an art that holds beauty, force, inner contradiction, and poetic power. As he precisely states: “My installations may not accumulate, but at the same time—they cannot be broken or erased.”
Curator: Shlomit Baumam
Opening: Thursday, 18.12.2025, 19:30
Gallery talk: Friday, 16.1.2026, 11:30
Closing: Saturday, 31.1.2026, 14:00
