Art – Society – Community

In recent decades, more and more artists around the world have been involved in artistic-communal activity which blurs the boundaries between art and life, encouraging discourse and social activism. This tendency is manifested, among others, in extra-institutional initiatives, independent and collective organizations of artists, combining artistic practice with social and political involvement, mainly in the periphery.
The cluster of exhibitions Art–Society–Community strives to shed light on various models of social involvement, through a range of projects by Israeli and international artists who operate within disempowered and excluded communities in different cultural and geographical regions. All these diverse practices of social-artistic activity are characterized by giving, breaking the traditional boundaries between artwork and audience, enhancing the interaction and dialogue between art and community, and expanding the notion of the “artistic space,” as each project brings problems, unique to the specific community in its historical, political, and economic contexts, to the fore. Some of the projects in this cluster present initiatives by artists active in their peripheral native communities, whose members take part in artistic acts, architectural tributes, and educational enrichment which contribute to the sense of community and local pride. Other artists engage in cross-continent social-artistic activism. Their activity is usually held in the public space, in which they intervene, leaving traces in the field in order to catalyze the residents to act and assimilate a change of consciousness. From this point of departure on the line between art and life, vision and practice, the projects oscillate between the local and the global, challenging art’s place in the array of forces underpinning urban, cultural, social, and political processes. Ultimately, all these undertakings aim at levering these processes and moving them toward healing and rehabilitation, possibly “tikkun.”