The Kids Want Communism

The second installment of the annual theme at MoBY—Museums of Bat Yam, marking the 99th

anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Various exhibitions by Israeli and international artists will be showcased throughout 2016 at MoBY and other art venues across the world.

Curated by Joshua Simon

The second installment will be open from Thursday, July 28, 2016 through November 12, 2016

The second installment features:

Nir Harel, Anna Lukashevsky, Nabil Maleh, Piyasiri Gunaratna, Noa Yafe, Ohad Meromi, Jonathan Gold, Raanan Harlap, Nicole Wermers, The Praxis Archive, and The Communist Party of Israel Archive.

The Kids Want Communism is a yearlong exhibition project at MoBY— Museums of Bat Yam. It is held in collaboration with a host of different artists and institutions around the world, and consists of exhibitions, lectures, performances, screenings and publications throughout 2016. Collaborating institutions include: Tranzit, Prague; The Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv; Free/Slow University, Warsaw; State of Concept, Athens; Skuc gallery, Ljubljana; and MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam.

The project is organized by Vít Havránek, Vladimir Vidmar, Joshua Simon, Iliana Fokianaki, Alexey Radinsky, and Kuba Szreder.

As part of the second installment of The Kids Want Communism at MoBY—Museums of Bat Yam, the following will be on display:

In the entrance hall of the museum Nir Harel presents his installation Charging Station, which brings together the proletarian leisure culture of the Soviet avant-garde and the current reality of endless non-material work on the Internet, in which our ability to socialize produces a value that can be translated into profit. On the second floor, Anna Lukashevsky presents a series of paintings titled Soviet Haifa, which consists of recent work depicting Haifa residents who continue to live—as she argues—the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this installment, Lukashevsky responds to her fellow New Barbizon group members,

who in the first installment of The Kids Want Communism presented works they painted as children in the Soviet Union. In addition, a collection of films curated by Tereza Stejskalová of Tranzit (Prague)—an institution which collaborates with MoBY on The Kids Want Communism—is screened under the title Filmmakers of the World, Unite! Of Exiled Images and Forgotten Internationalism. The collection includes short films from the late 1950s and early 1960s by directors Nosratollah Karimi (b.1925) from Iran, Nabil Maleh (1936-2016) from Syria, and Piyasiri Gunaratna (b. 1939) from Sri Lanka, who studied film in Prague at a time when it was considered “the Geneva of communism”—a cultural meeting place for artists from the third world and the Eastern Bloc. The display curated by Vladimir Vidmar of Skuc gallery, Ljubljana consists of publications, documents, and photographs associated with the Yugoslav internationalist school of Marxist thought—Praxis, which saw the height of its influence in the years 1963-1975, and which attracted some of the greatest Marxist thinkers of the time from the Eastern Bloc and Western countries, such as Ernst Bloch, Ágnes Heller, György Lukács, Milan Kangrga, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.

Internationalism and the brotherhood of nations are the focus of a special project created for the exhibition—a series of photographs courtesy of The Communist Party of Israel Archive. These document the political Jewish-Arab cooperation in Palestine, especially surrounding an expedition to Yugoslavia in 1946 to help lay a railroad track to Sarajevo. The display includes exclusive interviews made with two members of the expedition—Odeh El Ashab and the late David Rabinovici.

Additionally, on the second floor, continuing from the first installment, are installations by Noa Yafe and Raanan Harlap. The former present The Red Planet—a diorama of Mars, and the latter presents Public House—a wall relief of a tenement apartment. Next to Harlap’s installation is Ohad Meromi’s Structure for Rest—a space for daydreaming that was displayed in the entrance hall in the first installment. Nicole Wermers’s Great Soviet Encyclopedia—an incubator/sarcophagus displaying the English edition of the encyclopedia, is now located next to a mural by Jonathan Gold, who continues to paint a line of people jointly with children, groups and individuals visiting the exhibition.

As part of The Kids Want Communism at MoBY, a permanent space in the museum serves as a screening room featuring a selection of new and old works. For the second installment the screening room will feature a new 3D video work by American artist Micah Hesse, created specially for the exhibition.

More details and the complete exhibition program can be found on a special blog accompanying and elaborating on the international project: tkwc.tumblr.com

MoBY—Museums of Bat Yam, 6 Struma Street, Bat Yam

Opening hours:

Tue, Thur: 4pm-8pm

Fri, Sat: 10am-2pm

Free admission ##