Travelling the World to Israel

 

Two Israeli museums are showing the exhibition “Weltreise” with over 300 works by German artists.

 

The touring exhibition “Travelling the World” provides a comprehensive overview of the most important developments in German art since 1949. These works present an image of Germany parallel to political history, for example in Hannah Höch’s collages dealing with the Holocaust and the widespread suffering, the violence of war and Germany’s inner conflict after the Second World War, or in a drawing by Gerhard Altenbourg from the 1950s laying the dictatorship to rest in poetic and ironic fashion. The so-called new beginnings with Zero and the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, the rise of art photography and poster art in East and West Germany are all reflected in the exhibition. With a few exceptions, the roughly 350 works by over 80 artists in the show were all made in the last 50 years.

 

The exhibition was curated by Matthias Flügge and Matthias Winzen for ifa, the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations. The works in the show, which has been on tour since 2013, were selected from the ifa’s own large collection of contemporary art. On the occasion the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, “Travelling the World” will open to the public at two Israeli museums simultaneously on 10 October 2015, namely Art Gallery Umm el-Fahem and the Museum of Art Ein Harod. The two museums have been working together for years to encourage communication and the exchange of ideas between Jewish and Arab Israelis.

In Israel, the ifa is holding the exhibition together with the Goethe-Institut Israel. The ifa itself is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and the state capital Stuttgart. As a centre of competence for German foreign cultural and educational policy, the ifa connects civil society, cultural practice, art, media and science.