“My Muses Don’t Play or Sing. They Look Back at You”
In an era when artificial intelligence can generate an image at the press of a button, Raafat Khattab spent months seated at his loom, thread by thread, weaving the work “Three Blocks and One Gap, The Archetype of Human Thought.” He chose the exact opposite pace, millions of black threads, tied together by hand, to create a roughly six-meter-long work depicting a wild hunting scene. Despite the painstaking, slow technique, he is unwilling to work any other way. “It is very important to me to weave by hand and by myself, alone. Many people ask me, why don’t you give it to a student, or to a machine? No. It is important to me to do it myself, because of the artist’s energy that goes through the process. It charges the work with a special dimension. When the artist creates the work, the work itself becomes sublime.” Khattab is a multidisciplinary artist, one of hundreds of creators taking part in the third Tel Aviv Biennale for Art and Design 2026, “Acts and Days,” on view until November 30 at MUSA, the Eretz Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv. More than 200 works by Israeli artists are displayed in the exhibition, curated by Henrietta Eliezer Brunner and Galit Gaon.
The biennale is not a single exhibition but three circles of activity in the museum space, the central exhibition in the Rothschild Center, which presents most of the new works, 13 research projects in the permanent pavilions, ceramics, glass, coins, mail, folklore, Man and His Work, and Tel Qasile, where museum curators meet contemporary creators around items from the historical collection, and four rotating academic incubators led by Shenkar, the College of Management Academic Studies, the University of Haifa, and the Edmond de Rothschild Center. Galit Gaon, the biennale’s curator, describes it as three times existing simultaneously in the exhibition, past, present and future.
In November 1912, ten Yemeni immigrant families arrived at the Kinneret colony and lived nearby until 1930, when they were expelled from the place. They came following Rabbi David Israel Tza’iri, in order to be pioneers and work the land, and engaged in draining swamps and preparing the soil. The work gives digital life to the tillers of the land from Yemen at Kinneret and proposes a speculative future.
For more than a decade, Khattab has worked in the education department of the Tel Aviv Museum and guides visitors in front of works of art. He describes his work there as one of “guidance, dialogue, discussion, understanding complexities,” an approach that also accompanied him in creation. “The more I delve into the analysis of a work of art and the relationship between the viewer and the work itself, the more it affects how I create and how I want to convey messages,” he says. The image in Khattab’s work appears to be taken from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, a hunting scene, at the center of which is a struggle between pursuer and pursued. “The hunters ride horses, accompanied by dogs that hunt the wild boar,” he says. “It is a symbol of dualistic thinking, which makes us think in terms of victim and sacrificer, friend or enemy. You are either with us or you are not. I, on the other hand, belong to nothing, not to a nationality, not to a religion, not to society, not to a community. It took me many years to step out of the categories and stand aside, and observe society. It gives me perspective.”
The metaphor in the work is powerful and echoes Israeli reality. “The hunter is above all,” Khattab interprets. “He uses the horse and the dogs, who are enslaved, serving man. The dogs too. The wild boar represents the wild, freedom, liberty. It is the artist who is being killed and hunted, the one who has the freedom of imagination and thought.” Through the work, one can understand the difficulty of being an artist in Israel these days. “The situation is getting worse and worse. It is terrible to look at the deterioration of social morality,” Khattab says. “The Arab society is also deteriorating. That strengthens even more for me the questions concerning the role of the artist.”
One of the most prominent works in the exhibition is the girl with wings, who seems ready to fly at any moment, although she is completely injured. “It is an iconic image,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Henrietta Eliezer Brunner. “The first association is the mythological story of Daedalus and Icarus, who built wings for themselves in order to escape the island of Crete. It replaces Icarus with an injured girl. She is a figure that repeats itself. She has a stubborn expression, she does not give up. The wings are injured and she wants to rise into the sky against all odds, against gravity. We felt there was something strong there.”
Henrietta Eliezer Brunner and Galit Gaon issued a call for artists to submit works for the biennale, without knowing which works would be submitted, or whether any would be at all. “We set out after October 7 and we did not know where the biennale would find us. Artists closed their studios, the academies were closed, it was not clear what would happen. When we issued the call, we gave a broad enough theme to contain the complexity of the moment.”
The curators selected the works so that they would converse with the museum’s existing collection and thereby create something new. “Our emphasis is not only on the final thing, the final object or the work,” she stresses, “but also on the process behind it, the choice of materials, the work process, some of the works are accompanied by a tablet, where we see the process of creation. This is unique to the craft field. The biennale becomes a symphony, where each instrument has its own score. Creating the exhibition is like playing together and connecting all the details.” Noga Sela’s work, the sister of the late Michal Sela, was created as part of her final project in jewelry studies at Tel Hai. Eliezer Brunner describes it: “The objects are jewelry, necklaces. One is made of salt, an allegory for tears, for the pain she experienced in losing her sister. The second necklace wraps roots, which is the new growth out of the loss.”
The muses that Ronit Baranga created for the exhibition in the work “A Call to the Muses” are life-size, when we stand before them, they look directly at us at eye level. The lower part of the work is sculpted, and the upper part is painted in acrylic on clay panels. “It was important to me that the work be large and that the muses be life-size, so that the viewer would have a more significant experience,” Baranga explains. “It creates an interaction with the viewer and not with each other. They are at your height. You look at them and they look back at you.” The painted muses are actually her daughters. “I painted muses and used the children I am raising as models. But I did not paint my family,” she clarifies. “They enjoyed the process. They loved the result, and enjoyed coming to the opening and being photographed in front of the work, and feeling part of it. There is something complicated about being the children of artists. You miss a lot, but you also gain a lot. I used them a lot as models, even when they were little girls, that is the reality in a home where art is a significant part of life.”
The idea for the muses came from the biennale theme, “Acts and Days.” Baranga referred to the call to the muses at the opening of “Works and Days,” in the epic poem of Hesiod from the 8th century BCE. “I created it based on Greek mythology, I based it on Hesiod, but I expressed how I see it today,” she stresses. “Unlike the original relief, where the muses grant inspiration to artistic creation, my muses create nothing. They do not play or sing. They are not inspiration. The muse is absorbed in herself, in her inner conduct. We are in a world within ourselves. They are physically close but there is distance, strangeness, alienation. They look at the viewer but nothing is created between them. There is something very self-absorbed, ‘look at me.’ Cold and rooted in the day and in the now.”
“Do you think there is a sexist element in the fact that women’s role is to inspire as an object but not to create themselves as a subject?”
“As a female creator, in today’s reality, it is not true that the muse, the woman, will inspire me. I create from my own point of view and my own experiences. The muses of Greek mythology today are like mine. Echoing then. Rooted in now.”
