The connection between the labor settlement movement, Jewish culture,and contemporary art led to the formation of a unique collection at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, which encompasses approximately 20,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, graphic works, and Judaica items.
This collection outlines alternative paths, lending itself to challenging anddifferent perspectives on the history of Israeli art, its origins, trends anddirections, and accordingly, on Israeli society and local history. The Mishkan’s diverse collection also allows a rethinking of Judaism on levels that are notlimited to the religious-Orthodox, but rather extend to philosophical, cultural,visual, and political realms.

The Mishkan collections initially focused on works by Jewish artists and Judaica objects that arrived from Europe during World War II, recognizing the urgency of salvaging and preserving the culture and art of the Jewish communities that were facing annihilation. Over the years, Israeli artworks from the early 20th century to the present have been added to the collection, including an extensive collection of kibbutz artists and artists who worked outside of mainstream Israeli art for most of their career.

This exhibition examines these collections through the relationship between three categories – Labor, Work, and Action – as three sensibilities orthree basic principles. In her book The Human Condition, the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt claims that it is through action, and not thinking, that man distinguishes himself from animals. While the classical Western philosophical and religious thought gave precedence to the contemplative life (vita contemplativa), modern philosophers like Nietzsche and Marx turnedtheir attention to the active life (vita activa). Arendt joins them and divides the active life into three broad categories, whose combination she sees asessential to the human existence: Labor, Work, and Action. Labor is about meeting the body’s biological needs. It is life itself and it is what makes ourexistence possible. Work is world liness. It fashions objects and creates a worldof “things.” Action is the realm that exists only in human society and onlyafter man is free from his needs. Through action, man breaks away from the mundane, repetitive, and reactive. Arendt places the origin of action in the authentic impetus to initiate, to start something new, and to set processesin motion. Its significance lies in its execution, and it is not measured in its accomplishments or motivation.

The curation of the new permanent exhibition was informed by these three categories, which reverberate through the exhibition in a non-linear, non-thematic, and non-chronological way. With that, it summons unexpected,at times intuitive encounters between works from different periods, places,and styles – artworks from 19th century Europe and contemporary works fromIsrael; works by mainstream artists and lesser known or outsider artists;
renowned canonical works and works that were kept in the collection storageand were not publicly displayed for years. By facilitating new associations between works from the various museum collections, the exhibition turns aspotlight on the unique story of the Mishkan art collection, and offers a path through which we can try to fathom something about the present moment in history and the events of our time.