Places of Exile [02]
Minchen ve'Tel Aviv

The second in the annual series of exhibitions on “Places of Exile” focuses on the city of Tel Aviv, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in April 2009. Founded as a modest settlement just outside Jaffa in 1909, Tel Aviv – the first “Modernist Hebrew city” – soon became the symbol of Zionist hope that accompanied the many emigrants from Europe on their arrival in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s. Tel Aviv was virgin territory – not least of all for urban planners and architects. During this period the largest collection of buildings in the Bauhaus style of any city in the world was created in the city center. The Israeli photographer Yigal Gawze’s pictorial essay “Fragments of a Style” provides an insight into the characteristic image of the “White City” on the eastern Mediterranean coast.

At the same time, the exhibition “Minchen ve'Tel Aviv” also takes a look behind the facades of this city at the people who have lived and worked there. It traces the life histories of four Jewish artists who had their homes and were active in Munich for many years and for whom Tel Aviv became not only a place of exile in the 1930s but also a new heimat. The exhibition shows excerpts taken from the time when they arrived and settled in Tel Aviv and took up their earlier artistic activities again under utterly new conditions.