Two years ago, due to the war, the Tel-Hai Art Institute was evacuated — we were forced to leave our creative and living center for alternative locations.
This year, we are returning home.
It is not the first time that Tel-Hai has been abandoned and revived — like a karmic cycle, carried by a constant hope for repair. Throughout history, in battles along the Lebanese border, there were moments when Tel-Hai existed only by force of thought; the mountain turned to dust, and the threat of nothingness loomed. Borders shifted and blurred, past, present, and future intertwined into a story without end. A place charged with pathos and pain — emptied, revived, and reborn as a creative navel. Why? How? Where? Out of the tremor of the earth, question marks flow down from the mountain, along the fault line, flooding the land and all who dwell in it. Between the river and the sea, nowhere feels safe — not the body, nor the soul. The exhibition No.Where seeks to give voice to the pains of war and to reflect on place within placelessness — to remind us that imagination and creation are foundations of life. In the exhibition, lecturers and graduates of the Tel-Hai Art Institute pose questions about the notion of place: a personal place, a stance toward place, a place as homeland, and a place as absence.
Admiral Horatio Nelson, a warrior of the Napoleonic era who lost his right arm, suffered from intense phantom pains in his missing hand. The persistence of these sensations led him to declare that his phantom limb was “direct proof of the soul’s existence.” “If an arm can survive physical amputation,” he asked, “why not the person as a whole?” Nelson understood that existence is not merely the existence of the body.
When packing belongings in haste, priorities sharpen, and absence is felt almost immediately. Over the past two years, objects were gathered and sorted hurriedly — some abandoned, some stored temporarily. We condensed and reorganized in empty rooms stripped of memory. We became an optical illusion, like a mirror placed to hide a missing hand — pretending the place was still in place, pretending the mountain did not ache within us. When we returned, we no longer saw the same thing. The phantom pains remained, and the home echoed with the absence of those no longer there.
Out of this pain, we — the community of the Tel-Hai Art Institute — choose to imagine a place and to resist nothingness. We remind ourselves that our existence is not the body alone, and our severed hand is proof of the power of the spirit. We wish to look deeply — into what is now, into what was — and to hope for what may come: for a better place.
Curators: Maya Getzov and Noga Hadad
Participants: Ayala Tzur, Anat Rozenson Ben-Hur, Arik Halfon, Yair Glaycher, Michal Shachnai, Shai Maor, Hajar Khater, Yaara Rabinovitch, Meirav Niv Raviv, Rozan Batrice Khoury, Shay Gerassy, Elad Guterman, Ziva Ben Arav Rabinovitch, Lital Goldenberg, Sigal Lifshitz, Reut Dafna, Tili Aroch, Gal Maclean MitchellI, Rachel Rabinovitch, Opal Galili Vituri
Opening: Thursday, 30.10.25, 19:30
Gallery talk: Friday, 5.12.25, 11:30
Closing: Saturday, 13.12.25, 14:00
