Group Show | SOFT COVER

SOFT COVER GROUP SHOW
Curator: Neta Ganani

Opening event: Thursday, 27.11 at 20:00

In the digital age, where reading is increasingly distanced from touch and the book loses its physical tangibility, the book returns to center stage as living testimony of culture memory, and emotion.
The exhibition “Soft Cover” examines the book not only as an object for reading, but as a living, breathing body that bears the scars of time and use and preserves within it layers of knowledge, meaning, and human touch.
The participating artists approach the book as open raw material. They cut, sew, paint, burn, and embed new images within it.
These actions are not merely gestures of love or nostalgia for print, but a way to return and question what place knowledge holds in a world that prefers fleeting and superficial imagery over depth, and what remains of the physical experience of reading when everything becomes transient information.

Gaia Yoel paints intimate and tender scenes of women reading, in which the book becomes an emotional space and a moment of quiet, poetic contemplation.

Dana Zaltzman creates in her work moments of softness and intimacy that appear as if taken from another time. Her painting echoes the spirit of classical art – precision, light, and emotion – and invites the viewer to observe in a world where time stops and matter takes on a poetic quality.

In the more material dimension of the exhibition, Raz Akta creates an amulet-jewelry charged with memory and faith, in which text, material, and symbol combine into an object of spiritual protection and deep human connection.

Lahli Fruheling presents in her work “Genesis” a Bible cast in white plaster. The work seeks to create a space of silence and purity, and to re-examine the book identified with deep controversies in Israeli society. Like a “white square” echoing Malevich’s creation, the book becomes an abstract object, one that symbolizes beginning, foundation, and moral and cultural source. Despite being a focal point of disagreement, it is also what preserved us in the diaspora. “Genesis” seeks to strip away the noise surrounding it and connect to the simple, pure essence of our foundations.

Elia Bloch’s works are installed as a reading corner that invites the viewer to an intimate, warm experience, where light, book, and domestic object are charged with quiet, memory, and a sense of fragility.

Carmel Ilan engages in the deconstruction of the book, changing its meaning and giving the material new use and form. Her work creates a direct connection to the spirit of “Soft Cover”- recycling, renewal, and rethinking the memory embedded in the page and material.

In delicate and fragile lines, Ayala Tsur shapes porcelain into fine book pages that appear as remnants of text or prayer preserved from disappearance, echoing the desire to restore memory to the material and emotional weight to the word in the exhibition.

Orit Akta brings her unique perspective through painting, in which she transforms Bracha Serri’s play “Kriah” (Tearing) into an actual book, a tribute to silenced women breaking through. With precise minimalism, Akta conducts an intimate conversation with Serri about roots, erasure, and the woman’s voice seeking restoration.

In an Israeli art world oscillating between tradition and contemporary culture, the book assumes the role of a bridge and a finely tuned instrument, fostering dialogue between past and present, intellect and emotion, material action and conceptual reflection. It emerges here as a vulnerable testament, a symbol of the enduring desire to continue touching, understanding, and remembering.

“Soft Cover” does not seek to return the book to the shelf, but to the hands, to a place where reading becomes a creative and critical act, and the page breathes again with the pulse of time.