The Herzliya Biennial

The Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art was conceived in the mid-2000s by the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art under the directorship of Dalia Levin, who had been chief curator and director of the institution since 1993 and whose long tenure across the 1990s and 2000s had reframed the museum from a small local collection — founded in 1965 from a holding of paintings donated by Herzliya residents, originally housed in an apartment at 15 Bar Ilan Street — into an experimental contemporary platform of national and increasingly international reach. The biennial was Levin's structural argument for that reframing: a periodic Israeli contemporary art exhibition staged not in the national institutions of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but in the suburban coastal city to the north, and propagating from the museum outward into the everyday municipal fabric of Herzliya itself.

The founding edition, The Rear (Hebrew: Ha'Oref), opened on 23 September 2007 under the curatorship of Joshua Simon — then 28 years old, the youngest curator of an Israeli biennial of the decade — with directors Yehuda Ben Ezra and Dalia Levin. The exhibition presented new works commissioned from 75 Israeli artists across the museum and fourteen further sites in central Herzliya: underground warehouses, storage halls, residential apartments, shops, and the city's bomb shelters. The artist list named the working core of the Israeli mid-2000s contemporary scene — Guy Ben-Ner, Mika Rottenberg, Roee Rosen, Yair Garbuz, Ariella Azoulay, Ari Libsker, Zoya Cherkassky, Keren Cytter and Sigalit Landau among them — and the curatorial argument fastened on the Hebrew word oref, which denotes simultaneously the home front, the hinterland, and the nape of the neck. The framing was political: Simon's opening manifesto cited the previous summer's 2006 Lebanon War and the displacement of a million civilians on either side of the border, and positioned the biennial as a working examination of the civilian rear as the constituting site of Israeli contemporary art practice.

The second edition opened in October 2009 across the Sukkot holiday week, from 3 to 10 October — a compact, festival-format edition curated by Noga Bernstein, Galit Gaon and Yael Guilat (with assistant curators Aya Armoni and Tzafi Sivan Spivak) and again sited at the museum and across the central streets of Herzliya. The third and final edition, The Second Strike, opened on 9 October 2011 under the curatorship of Ory Dessau and in formal collaboration with the Tel Aviv contemporary art fair ART TLV; the exhibition presented thirty-five Israeli and international artists across the museum and the city, and took its title from the bilateral nuclear-strategy term for the retaliatory response that follows a first strike, framing the artworks not as primary statements but as responses, repetitions, adaptations and disruptions of conditions already underway. No fourth edition has been announced.

An institution that closed its biennial but kept its museum

The structural feature that distinguishes the Herzliya Biennial within the Israeli contemporary art field is that the institution survived its biennial: the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art has continued to operate without interruption from the closure of the 2011 edition through to the present, mounting roughly four exhibitions a year and accumulating more than eight hundred and fifty exhibitions across its history. Dalia Levin closed her own directorship in 2014, succeeded by Dr Aya Lurie, who has continued the museum's contemporary programme without re-mounting the biennial format. The Herzliya Biennial therefore reads, in retrospect, as a particular project of the 2007–2011 window — three editions across five years, all under Levin's institutional aegis — rather than as a continuing programme suspended for external cause. Its absence is the substantive editorial fact about its existence.

The biennial's significance for the Israeli field of the late 2000s and early 2010s lay precisely in its scale and siting. It was not constituted as a national flagship comparable to Sharjah's emirate-scale GCC biennial or to the Berlin Biennale's post-Cold War institutional weight; it was constituted, instead, as a municipal-scale museum biennial — the museum and the city of Herzliya rather than the state — and it programmed a generation of Israeli artists at the moment of their emergence into international visibility, while the wider geopolitical setting (the 2006 Lebanon War; the 2008–09 and 2014 Gaza wars on either side of its run) supplied the subject matter that the biennial's framings repeatedly and unambiguously named. The three titles — The Rear, the Sukkot festival edition, The Second Strike — together describe an Israeli contemporary art biennial whose curatorial argument across five years was that the home front is the working subject of the work.