Ha'Dira Residency Hosts: What Has Been and What Will Become | Tsibi Geva

Opening: 15.10.2024 Tuesday at 20:00

Over a five-week stay at the Liebling Haus residency program, Ha’Dira (The Apartment), artist Tsibi Geva enacted an accumulative process of settling in a home. This gradual action in the residency apartment involved Geva placing his artworks and found objects while exploring their relationship to the hosting modernist building, a symbol of the construction of the Zionist project.
In the aftermath of October 7, amid the ongoing war and the civil and political struggle over the country’s identity and future, Geva explores how these events influence our subconscious and shape everyday behavior in private and public spaces.
In contrast to his father, Yaacov (Coba) Geber, an active modernist architect who fought for his vision and precision, Geva is intrigued by human interventions in buildings: shutters, bars, closed balconies, changed windows, lattices, tarps and all the traces of life seeping into the built environment. He sees these “interferences” as signs of resistance to the idea of artificial unity and the imagined melting pot.
The actions within the space reflect his inner world, creative process and sense of urgency and anxiety as part of a profound existential state
The second part of the exhibition, in the Project Room on the ground floor, presents his rejected proposal for the 2003 Venice Biennale. The two spaces complete one story that seeks to explore – through the attitude to architecture and the mechanism of destruction and construction – the tension between the Jewish-Zionist ethos and the current disintegration of its utopian vision. He examines our identity and sense of belonging to this place and asks how we envision its future

The second part of the exhibition, in the Project Room on the ground floor, presents his rejected proposal for the 2003 Venice Biennale. The two spaces complete one story that seeks to explore – through the attitude to architecture and the mechanism of destruction and construction – the tension between the Jewish-Zionist ethos and the current disintegration of its utopian vision. He examines our identity and sense of belonging to this place and asks how we envision its future


Curator: Arch. Sabrina Cegla
Assistant curator: Michal Lichtenstein, Noa Helene Omri
Tsibi Geva studio managers: Talya Shalit, Avital Inbar
Mounting: Carmel Ben-Or, Liav Levy
Video: Danielle Liberman
Text editing: Zipa Kempinsky
English translation: Sivan Raveh
Graphic design: Ran Malul
Model: Michal David

Tsibi Geva is one of Israel's most prominent artists. His works deal with Israeli-Palestinian existence, local identity and the cultural, political and personal meaning of symbols and fundamental terms in Israeli society - the conflict, wars and everyday life. Born in 1951 in Kibbutz Ein Shemer, he lives and works in Tel Aviv and New York. Since 1979, Geva has exhibited extensively in leading cultural institutions worldwide, Including the Israeli Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). His works are in major public and private collections. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Sandberg Prize from The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Mendel and Eva Pundik Foundation Prize from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture. Geva is a professor at the School of Visual Arts, MFA program, NY; the University of Haifa; and Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel.

HaDira (The Apartment)
The residency program at Liebling House, HaDira (The Apartment), takes place in the historic Scheuer family apartment. The program, which seeks to echo the building's original use as a residence, invites creatives from various fields to temporarily stay in the apartment, which is typical of the International Style, and create site-specific work inspired by it.
This presents a unique opportunity to explore and engage with the values and culture that shaped the apartment, offering a living dialogue with it. In doing so, the very act of staying in the space becomes part of a critical and interpretive conservation practice, serving as a foundation for rethinking urban life—past, present, and future—against the backdrop of contemporary challenges.