A new exhibition at the Givat Haviva Art Gallery in northern Israel revisits a landmark 1972 conceptual art project called Metzer-Meiser, which took place along the seamline between Kibbutz Metzer and the Arab village Meiser. The original project involved four Israeli artists—Dov Or-Ner, Moshe Gershuni, Avital Geva, and Micha Ullman—who created actions exploring Jewish-Arab coexistence, including burying personal items, parcelling land, scattering books, and exchanging soil between the two communities. The contemporary exhibition, "Metzer-Meiser: Take 2," co-curated by Anat Lidror and Tali Tamir, includes two of the original artists (Geva and Ullman) alongside ten contemporary Jewish and Palestinian artists, responding to the original project's themes of connection, fear, and trust.
This exhibition matters because it reexamines one of the first Israeli art projects to directly address the Jewish-Arab space, doing so at a politically charged moment—opening just after a tenuous ceasefire in the longest war in the country's history. The original project took place a year before the Yom Kippur War, and the current show reflects on how the hyphen between the two communities both connects and contains tensions, misunderstandings, and hopes. By including Arab and women artists who were absent from the 1972 project, the exhibition offers a critical reassessment of the original's legacy and its relevance to ongoing efforts at reconciliation.