The gallery talk will deal with the work process, research, and creation of the exhibition currently on display at Asif, “Home Away From Home Away From Home: A Tribute to Workers’ Restaurants.” The discussion will be moderated by Yuval Sa’ar, editor and founder of the online design and art magazine Portfolio. He will be joined by exhibition curators Lia Rosin and Rona Zinger, as well as two of its co-creators, professor Nir Avieli and the designer professor Dov Ganchrow. The ticket price includes drinks and snacks.
What are workers’ restaurants in Israel? The exhibition and the accompanying content are an ongoing discussion of this question. They aim to disassemble and reassemble its visual, human, and culinary characteristics through different prisms and with their help to ask complex questions about our society like: Are there still workers’ restaurants in Israel? Are these home-style restaurants or also street food spots, even fast food chains and coffee shops? Could it be that the term is used as a way to white-ash restaurants that feed migrant workers and asylum seekers in an attempt to obscure the fact that the workers are often the newest immigrants? Are there any workers at all today that can go out to eat in a restaurant in the middle of the workday, or is this an imaginary idea that has been romanticized?
The gallery talk is an opportunity to understand the story, thought, and questions behind the exhibition. By breaking the myth of the workers’ restaurants, we can learn about the social and economic transformations in Israel in the past century and attitudes towards immigrants.
The ticket price includes a bottle of Taiba beer and three salads for the table. Dishes from the deli menu will also be available.
Join us for a tour before: From 16:30-17:30 there will be a tour of Asif including the library, the exhibition, and the educational rooftop farm. Click here for more details and to purchase tickets for the tour. Please note that tour tickets are separate from those for the gallery talk.
Yuval Saar
Chief Editor and Founder of Portfolio Magazine
In 2014 he initiated the Tel Aviv Week of Illustration, and has been its chief curator and artistic director ever since. Yuval has curated exhibitions in various museums, such as Design Museum Holon, The Museum of Islamic Art, The Eretz Israel Museum, Jaffa Museum and more. In the years 2015-2017 he was head of The Shenkar Institute for Research and Documentation of Design in Israel.
Liora Rosin
Desiner, Researcher & Curator
Designer and design researcher specializing in the field of food. Lecturer in the bachelor’s degree in and in the master’s degree program in industrial design in Bezalel and owns an independent studio.
Rona Zinger
Curator and Exhibitions Designer
Worked in recent years as an exhibition designer at the Holon Design Museum. Design lecturer at HIT, Holon Institute of Technology. Graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the department of industrial design, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Nir Avieli
A Professor of Anthropology
Nir Avieli is a professor of anthropology who specializes in the study of food culture, tourism, and heritage studies. He is the former chair of the department of sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University, and past president of the Israeli Anthropological Association. He is the author of dozens of articles as well as the books of “Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town” and “Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel.” He is currently writing “Food and Freedom: Culinary Redemption in the Israeli Periphery.”
Dov Ganchrow
A Proffesor of Industrial Design
Product designer and associate professor in the industrial design department (B.Des/M.Des) at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where he graduated in 1993. Ganchrow works in diverse design fields such as medical tools, home and kitchen, furniture and lighting, exhibitions and public space, alongside creating more personal, experimental and conceptual works. Many of these works, sometimes created with his former studio partner Prof. Ami Derech (1963-2012), have been widely exhibited and are found in private and museum collections.