About
In House is a pop-up gallery that presents video art, screened on the windows of the greenhouse near the Embassy of Israel. The video art will be shown for a limited period of time and can be seen from the public space freely.
The first edition was launched on December 2022, during the longest nights of the year. It was also during the holidays of Hanukkah and Christmas - a very appropriate time to launch a light gallery.
This spring, as part of the Stockholm Kulturnatt, we launch the second episode of this platform with a new exhibition called Women׳s Labour.
We hope this project will evolve and allow more creative collaborations with both Swedish and Israeli partners in the future.
​
In House is an initiative of the Embassy of Israel.
The videos are screened in a continuous 15-minute loop throughout the night.
Special Thanks: SFV, Jonas Grander, Drorit Gur Arie.
# 2
Women׳s Labour
Stockholm Kulturnatt April 2024
Three female Israeli artists participate in the second edition of In House gallery. All the works were created between the years 2012 and 2023 and were parts of larger exhibitions.
Central to these artworks is the recurring theme of solitary female figures engaging, sometimes in a struggle, with nature and their bodies.
Filmed across diverse Israeli landscapes—deserts, seas, and agricultural villages — the pieces converge on the windows of a historic building in central Stockholm in a 15 minutes loop.
Hilla Ben Ari presents a trilogy of videos capturing women in challenging physical poses. One balances a bag of wheat seeds in a Bow pose, another is standing in a Bridge pose bending over a seedling planted underneath her and a third maintains the same posture over a small fire. This suspended state between impending disaster and struggling life exudes both poetry and tension. These challenged female bodies in Ben Ari’s oeuvres are both the subject and medium she uses to explore the tension between private and collective identities, strength and collapse, torture and transcendence.
​
Orit Raff's videos also evoke danger. In one, the artist׳s daughter waters the sea with a garden hose in a ritual reminiscent of a religious Madonna, hinting at an eventual disappearance. Adjacent, a silent church bell tolls underwater — a haunting reminder of a 14th-century German town's submergence due to a flood, with myth claiming the bells continued to ring beneath the sea.
​
Swedish actress Maria Salomaa takes center stage in Lee Yanor's videos. In one, she flees through a toxic illuminated desert, chased or chasing an enigmatic pursuit, seemingly running out of both space and time. In another, she attempts to make a bed in the sea, unfolding a duvet on the water with unwavering determination, seeking to carve out an intimate space in an impossible setting.
​
​
Curated by Anat Safran and Drorit Gur-Arie
​
​
The deliberate choice to present in the foreground female artists and female characters emerged in the inaugural edition of In House in winter 2022.
Our reality took a drastic and tragic turn since October 7th 2023 and it is impossible to ignore today the women victims and the hostages that are still submitted to violence and who’s voices are silenced.
Artists #2
Women׳s Labour
Hilla Ben Ari
Na'amah – A Tribute to Nahum Benari, 2015
​
Seedling
2012
​
The video project Na’amah is a visual Midrash on the play “Tubal-Cain,” which was written in 1951 by Nahum Benari, the artist’s great uncle. The play offers an interpretation of the Biblical story of Tubal-Cain while confronting issues of community, power and sin. One of the key gestures carried out in the video by the character of Na’amah is an effort to maintain balance. This gesture reappears throughout the video as a recurrent attempt to accord volume and vocal presence to the mute female body.
​
Raising questions regarding the body’s boundaries and limitations, Ben Ari places the female figures in her video works in nearly impossible postures. Thus, the body appears almost frozen, as if it was part of a video still. Its sole movement is that of endless, Sisyphean effort, trying to hold and balance the difficult posture it is committed to. The feminine body appears to be in an infinite crucial moment, trapped between its virtuosic flexibility and the painful strain of holding its posture.
These challenged female bodies in Ben Ari’s oeuvres are both the subject and medium she uses to explore the tension between private and collective identities, strength and collapse, and torture and transcendence.
​
Hilla Ben Ari, 'Seedling', 2012, video, 2:04 min' loop, dancer: Adva Kaedar, photography and editing: Asaf Saban
​
​
Hilla Ben Ari
Multidisciplinary artist creating mainly in video, sculpture, installation and print.
Born in 1972 in Tel Aviv.
The central theme of her works is the female body, which serves as a metaphorical junction where private, social and political conventions, restrictions and constructs are fused together.
Ben Ari’s corpus maintains an ongoing dialogue with the creative fields of theatre and dance performance, thus creating an intersection between visual arts and performing arts.
​
​
Orit Raff
Rungholt Bell
2023
​
Girl with hose
2023
​
​Both videos were part of the exhibition ׳׳Many Waters׳׳. The inspiration for the exhibition was the story of the flooding and sinking of Rungholt – a prosperous port city on the German coast, which was flooded in a storm and sank beneath the waves of the North Sea in the 14th century. The myths of the lost continent Atlantis and Noah’s biblical flood resonate in this story,
​
At the heart of the video animation Rungholt Bell swings a giant bell, a fictional testament to the sunken church, the crisis of faith, and the dissolution of existing social orders.
The video creates a space in which the forces of nature and culture spar with one another in a continuous loop: The forces of nature may have destroyed the religious structure and the social order it represents, but the sounds of the past continue to ring in the deep.
​
In Girl with hose the position of the young woman in the middle of the sea brings to mind the figure of Venus emerging from the waves in Botticelli’s famous painting. But the young figure in the video, the artist’s daughter, resignedly disappears beneath the waves, and in contrast to Venus, returns to her aquatic origin, the womb of the world.
Rungholt Bell
4K video projection
00:05:32 minutes (projected in a loop)
​
Girl with hose
4K video projection
00:04:12 minutes (projected in a loop)
​
Exhibition credits:
Producer: Naama Pyritz
Director of Photography: Avner Shahaf
Sound Design: Daniel Meir
Bell Animation: Eran Lazar
Girl with hose: Mika Goren
Orit Raff
Born in 1970 in Jerusalem
Orit Raff creates spare photographs, installations, and video works, which suggest intimacy, the private self, and evoke memories of our earliest experiences.
Raff favours the implicit over the explicit. She follows traces and signs of a place or a time with her camera, wishing to give life to a frozen memory and to construct a narrative from vague fragments, left behind as a present absence.
Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard College.
​
Lee Yanor
Vanishings & farewells
Animal Sunset
​
Water sleep
2019, 5 HD Video installation
Vanishings & farewells oscillates between the blinding light associated with the end and a yearning which marks a new beginning.
Maria Salomaa appears in the videos melancholic, sensual, absurd, dreamlike.
More vague and more mysterious – as temporal “duration” in which time and space, past and future, are fused into a continuous present.
The colours and the different landscapes become a stage of human loneliness & absurdity. Raising visual situations on the threshold of bottomless pain blended with cautious optimism
​
With the participation of Maria Salomaa; Editing Mariana Bouhsira , Ifat Tadmor; Original music Phil Von
​
Lee Yanor
​
Visual Artist, filmmaker and photographer.
Born in 1963 in Haifa.
Lee Yanor works creatively interweaving plastic arts, photography, dance, music, sound and technology. Movement is an element that has a philosophical and physical presence within her. Through her video-installations, emulsions and holograms, she brings out the materiality of the image and imprints countless layers of reflexive and collective memories in time and space.
Lee studied Art and Photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, at the Pratt Institute in New York, and at Paris 8 University where she received a Master of Fine Arts in 1993.
# 1
Inside-Out
December 2022
Our first exhibition Inside-Out presents video art by four Israeli women artists who deal with our most private space - the home. They examine different points of view alternating between the private and the public, the mundane and the spectacular. Although all the works are existing works that have been presented before in galleries and art centers in Israel, they have been adapted for the specific location and format of the greenhouse windows.
A window is the element that connects/separates the public from the private. Yet in all presented art works the windows become a portal to another place and time, where the border between the indoors and the outdoors is no longer clear and the viewer is peeking into somebody else's rituals and human behavior.
Artists #1
Inside Out
Window
Lila Chitayat and Alit Kreiz
Window
​
Window is a work taking place in the backyard of the ‘white city’ neighborhoods of Tel Aviv. This common space is typical to residential buildings, the left over back yards where all window meet. This area, very private yet public is the place where the most private interiors of our home are exposed outward, placing unknown neighbors in very close proximity. Through this work the artists examine the notion of home in cities. What turns a building into a home?
‘Window’ was first initiated at the exhibition Home.Building in Liebling Haus Tel Aviv as part of an artist in residence program between Liebling Haus and the Environment and Sustainability Authority. Curators of home.building: Anat Levi & Shira Levy Benyemini
​
Lila Chitayat (b. 1970, Jerusalem. Lives and works in Tel Aviv). An architect, new media artist and an experimental practitioner of design. Lila holds a Master in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, NY, B.Arch from Pratt Institute, NY and a B.Des from Holon Inst. of Tech. Lila is a full time senior lecturer at the Design faculty of H.I.T institute of technology teaching at the Interior Design department. Her works are presented in museums and galleries in Israel and Internationally.
​
Alit Kreiz (b. 1967, London, UK. Lives and works in Tel Aviv). A performance artist and educator, Alit holds a master’s degree and a B.Ed. in theater and theater directing from the Faculty of Arts at Kibbutzim College,Tel Aviv. She has been creating multidisciplinary performance-based works since 1997. Her work has been presented both in Europe and Israel. Alit currently lectures and teaches performance art.
Frida
Tal Kronkop
Frida, Black Eyed Peas
​
Frida is the artist's grandmother and the main character in a video created during Covid lockdown. Through a gentle choreography the typical Israeli shutters slowly let the light and the outside world in.
Black Eyed Peas shows the artist with her grandmother seated in front of the same window, peeling a huge pile of beans that separates and connects them at the same time.
Frida
Made by Tal Kronkop
Participants: Frida Kronkop, Tal Kronkop
Colourist: Eiv Kristal
​
Black Eyed Peas
Director and editor: Tal Kronkop
Cinematographer: avi Siman-Tov
Participants: Frida Kronkop, Tal Kronkop
Colourist: Eiv Kristal
​
Tal Kronkop (b. 1993, Tel Aviv. lives and works in between Tel Aviv and London). A video and performance artist, Tal holds an MA in Screendance from London Contemporary Dance School. Her work is presented in exhibitions as well as dance and film festivals in Israel and Internationally.
Black Eyed Peas
Elvive
Sharon Balaban
Kamil Blue, Elvive
​
Sharon works with everyday simple objects and turns them into magical moments of wonder. A baby soap in a toxic turquoise color slowly finds it way into a woman׳s hands. Colored shampoo is spilled out slowly from its container making perfect round shapes of red puddles.
​
Sharon Balaban (b. 1971, Lives and works in Jerusalem).Sharon is a video artist and Senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where she has served over the past decade as head of Video Studies in the Department of Screen-Based Arts. Her works are shown at galleries and museums in Israel and internationally.
@sharon.balaban