Sharon Glazberg’s exhibition, “Mishkan”, on show in the central colonnade in the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, is in essence a processual exhibition that keeps changing its form throughout the three months it is on display. The starting point for the exhibition was the placing of Ytong blocks into the museum space. These blocks contained memory-conducting objects that had been given to the artist by members and children in Ein Harod, and were inserted into the blocks during the casting process, while the material was still fluid. The heavy blocks were produced and transported to Ein Harod in collaboration with the Ytong plant in Caesarea. Also on show in the exhibition are display cases of archeological findings from the vicinity, brought here from the nearby Beit Shturman Museum. Thus the exhibition brings together different narratives of the production and design of meaning – a production plant, a kibbutz, and an art museum – and also juxtaposes the strategies of collecting, narrating and displaying of two local museums – the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, founded in 1938 as an art museum, and the Beit Shturman Museum, established in 1940 as a museum of nature and archeology, in memory of Haim Shturman, a member of the kibbutz. The material of the Ytong blocks, which are identified with the “Project of Building the Land”, is a chemical combination of cement, gravel and sand with water, which is exposed to high temperatures during the production process. The weak point of this material, which is capable of bearing very heavy loads, is its lack of flexibility. In answer to this, iron is used to make the material more flexible. Instead of the iron, Sharon Glazberg inserted multi-generational memory-conducting objects which are to be dug out in the course of the exhibition by children and adults, in order to extricate them from the Ytong blocks so they can be shown in the museum as findings from archeological diggings.

Sharon Glazberg has been active in Ein Harod for about two years. During the period of the exhibition the entire exhibition space will turn into a studio, a research workshop, a forum for meetings, and a display stage. The exhibition’s title, “Mishkan”, refers to the museum’s function and context – a “Mishkan” [a Biblical Hebrew word generally translated as “tabernacle”; its literal meaning is “abode” (Tr.)] located in a kibbutz, with all its connections to questions of “art and life” and “social sculpture” , a subject that has been a focus of her work for many years. The exhibition takes apart, builds, and overturns parallel narratives in the dynamic, dialectical relationship between memory and history, private and collective memory, in the very community that has such a complex history of society building and also in the nation building in Eretz Israel.