Wall of Craft
2025

The ceramic mural installed at the entrance to the ‘Workers Quarter’ (Kiryat Hamelacha) on the northern wall of the Haaretz Newspaper building (21 Shocken Street corner Haamal Street, Tel Aviv) and facing the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center, presents a tapestry of tiles where each one bears a layer of meaning, material, cultural and visual, alongside personal symbolic meanings of the makers. This is a piece that has many facets where each group of tiles echoes local memory, form and technological research and a passion for making in a common space.

It is a project built as an act for the public space and exists as a collection, adapted to give meaning and a new interpretation of a local tradition, a variety of work methods and personal as well as collective images. The tiles were created using different work methods such as hand building, relief, printing, CNC, scanning and 3D printing, casting in molds, a combination of work methods creating an interesting texture where together they create forms of free expression, historical memory and contemporary vision.   

The work functions as a cultural file, or an open archive of materials that aims to summarize work processes and sources of knowledge and enables a glimpse of the past that is deconstructed and reconstructed as a cultural tradition that was an integral part of the public space.  On one hand the mural is inspired by the tradition of ceramic wall tile murals that were common in Israel in the second half of the previous century on walls of schools, kibbutzim, educational and cultural institutions and reflected the collective vision, ideology, everyday aesthetic.  On the other hand, it builds a new path: contemporary interpretation with the aim of broadening and deepening the concept of place through a variety of viewpoints and layered form and language.

From this we derive the broad meaning of the wall that functions as an art object, a cultural symbol and a material tribute to the past and the future simultaneously.   The possibility of reviving ceramic art in the public space and the urban landscape where art has an essential role: to organize, connect and mark a physical (meeting point or milestone) and ideological place.  The project ‘Wall of Craft’ is a spatial act offering a return to ceramic murals in the public space as a visual language and an organizational force.  It anchors the memory of ceramic murals that at the time bore a joint vision which tried to express a language and local material culture and at the same time extend the borders of the local artistic dialogue.

The wall was created with the support and professional assistance of the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center as a part of the exhibition ‘Wall to Wall’ exhibited in the Benyamini Gallery and with the cooperation of the group of artists and designers who work in various fields of making.

Curator: Avi Ben Shoshan

Uncovering: Thursday, 29/5/25, 18:30
Haaretz newspaper building, 21 Shocken Street, corner Haamal Street, Tel Aviv – Jaffa

https://www.benyaminiceramics.org/en/ceramic-galleries/current-exhibitions/wall-to-wall/wall-of-craft/