The Martine De Souza-Dassault Brain Art Gallery

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
Albert Einstein, 1937

Current exhibition

January 2024 – March 2024

It is not by chance that many of the tools developed to study ourselves, whether through artifacts we created in the past, or through our physiological workings, rely on, and output, visual data. Both the fields of Brain Sciences and Archaeology make use of and develop such tools as a regular part of study methodology.
The ability to see localized electrical activity or oxygenation in our brains through technologies such as fMRI or EEG has been paramount in mapping ourselves out as the field of Brain Sciences progresses.
The field of Computational Archaeology develops and applies digital tools to 3D scanned artifacts and excavated surroundings, to better understand past hominin activity.
These computational tools tell us about ourselves – and they do so twice: Once as a means of analyzing and secondly as representations of our interests and capabilities. These visualization tools also have great potential as a disruptive or alternative and subjective creative means. Tools that by the very definition of a tool, propose the creation of something new.

Past exhibitions

March 2023 – August 2023

The properties of sound, like smell, are dominant: sound – when it is present – cannot be avoided. Different people have different sensitivities to sounds and frequencies, to amplification, to clarity and to sound quality. Artists who make significant use of sound are in fact building on common perceptions and unconscious responses, at least in part.
In his attempt to reflect the world of images, the artist Amnon Wolman presents the world of the imagination, in which melodies are created in the brain on the basis of past and present external experiences, alongside the findings of the researchers who chart the path of the notes between their creation and their understanding and interpretation in the brain towards their transformation into an image.

Sundowning

June 2022 – October 2022

The blurring of the photographic image and the dissolution of reality into its primary and raw elements through stain, form, and material are used as tools by Dan Orimian, the painter and son, to express the inconceivable gap between observing his mother’s present image and the gaping and inaccessible space left in her. The artwork brings together the perspectives of the artist, his mother, and the viewers, capturing another perceptual gap as described by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan when distinguishing between sight and gaze: The emergence of the mother figure as perceived by the visual system undergoes the interpretive gaze of the son as returned to him through her blurred, unfocused, frightened eyes, which can no longer recognize her world. The works manage to illustrate the twilight stage in the transition between the symbolic and the realistic dimensions, between the social order and the chaos from which things came and to which all things return.

Working Memory

November 2021 – March 2022

Alon Kedem describes himself as a hunter-gatherer, casting his net and gathering imagery from around the world. He roughly sketches these surprising images on the canvas, eventually turning them into the final piece. For Alon, the woven canvas is a field upon which imagery and signs are constantly in the process of becoming. By externalizing the images etched in his mind, the canvas absorbs them, captivating his urges. The paintbrush obscures, disassembles, and rebuilds the images – a constant state of invention, where each layer simultaneously erases and creates something new.

Stop ! Wandering

March 2021 – August  2021

Curation is the act of creating of new contexts for displaying cultural artifacts. Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary cooperation has given rise to multi-voiced interpretations by artist, curator, and scientist – pushing aside the concept of singular “genius.”

Retinopathy

December 2019 – October 2020
The Retinopathy exhibition opened at the Martine de Souza-Dassault Brain Art Gallery on December 8, 2019. Curated by the Hebrew University curator, Michal Mor, the exhibition deals with discrepancies between sensory input and the deciphering of reality. Retinopathy, which refers to damage to the retina in the eye, is a collaboration between neuroscience researcher Dr. Ayelet McKyton and artist Ayelet Carmi.

Photography: Youval Hai

Future gallery events

DateTimeEvent
TBATBAGallery Talk – Working Memory

Past gallery events

DateTimeEvent
29.11.202110:30Gallery Opening – Working Memory
11.04.202111:00Gallery Opening – Stop ! Wandering
07.03.202118:30Gallery Talk – Stop ! Wandering
31.01.202013:00Gallery Talk – Retinotopy
09.01.202012:00Gallery Opening – Retinotopy

“Working memory”