There are moments when language fails – not because words are insufficient in principle, but because the weight they are asked to carry exceeds their capacity. The past two years have been such a moment. Faced with events that resist containment, explanation, or resolution, words often arrive late, or not at all. They circle what has happened, gesture toward it, but fall short of naming the lived experience itself – our fear, our grief, our exhaustion, our fragile existence.
At such moments, speech itself is reduced to its most elemental form. One such voice belongs to Natan Alterman (1910–1970), among the most central figures of modern Hebrew poetry, whose writing repeatedly confronts moments of moral and historical extremity.
To the Master of the Universe, wherever He may be—
Gevald.[1]
It is precisely at such times that culture, and art in particular, assumes a different role – not as illustration, commentary, or consolation, but as a form of expression that precedes language and survives where it falters. Art does not resolve; it holds. It does not explain; it allows contradiction, ambiguity, and emotion to coexist without forcing them into coherence. When speech breaks down, art continues to speak—not in sentences, but in images, gestures, materials, and acts of attention.
When history feels unfinished
This understanding shaped My Life at the Moment. Happening between two exhibitions devoted to major figures in Israeli art – Pinchas Litvinovsky, whose work belongs to the foundational canon of Israeli painting, and the forthcoming exhibition of the legendary photographer Aliza Auerbach – we chose here to pause, and to turn instead to five prominent Jerusalem-based artists working now, from within the present. This was not a step away from excellence or recognition, but a different curatorial gesture: a decision to look closely at how art is made when history feels unfinished, the ground unstable, and certainty unavailable.
Through painting, drawing, photography, and print, the works in this exhibition offer no single narrative and no unified response. What they share is a commitment to attention – to faces, domestic spaces, the body of the artist, mythic and biblical imagery that returns with renewed urgency, alongside Zionist images shaped by an inner turbulence and the act of looking itself. These works were not created at a distance from events, but within them. They are not conclusions, but processes: attempts to see, to hold, to continue.
Opening another possibility
As a cultural center rooted in Jerusalem, Beit Avi Chai has, since October 7, initiated many different programs in response to the horror of those days – programs grounded, for the most part, in words: in conversation, study, testimony, and reflection, alongside other forms of cultural programming. These have included creative writing workshops; expanded work with youth, young adults, and the IDF; Kabbalat Shabbat gatherings at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv and in the Beit Avi Chai courtyard in Jerusalem; programs for families and children. Language has been central to this effort, even as it has repeatedly strained under the weight placed upon it.
The My Life at the Moment exhibition opens another possibility: a space in which response takes shape precisely where words falter, where meaning is carried not by speech but by image, gesture, material, and presence. Beit Avi Chai has chosen here to bring notable artists of the city – artists who live and work within Jerusalem’s cultural and artistic scene – to the foreground of the gallery. The exhibition emerges not only from this place, but from within it.
The title of the exhibition, drawn from a line by the Jerusalem poet Israel Eliraz, insists on the present tense. It does not claim clarity, closure, or understanding. It names a moment that has not yet resolved itself. As Yosef Ḥaim Brenner wrote, there are moments when history refuses resolution, when reckoning remains suspended and meaning unfinished. “The account has yet to be settled.” This is not a declaration; it is a condition. It is where we are.
Allowing complexity to linger
Our exhibition owes its shape, sensitivity, and precision to the curators, Amichai Chasson and Rika Grinfeld Barnea. Their work here is marked by restraint, attentiveness, and deep trust in both the artists and the viewer. Rather than impose interpretation, they created a framework in which the works can be encountered on their own terms – allowing complexity to linger, and silence to retain its place.
At a time when words so often fail us, this exhibition offers another form of articulation. Not answers, but presence. Not resolution, but witnessing. And with that presence comes a quiet hope – for days of greater stillness, for the easing of fear, and for the possibility that we may once again find room to breathe. This, for now, is our life at the moment.
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Main Photo: Seeing You Seeing Me, 100x180 cm. Oil on jute canvas\ Alon Kedem