The exhibition, City on Troubled Waters, is curated by Nir Harmat and will open at 27 Bialik Street as part of the city’s “Loving Art, Making Art” events. Its published description approaches urban memory through materials and images rather than a single chronological account: buildings, fragments, private stories and the movement of people become evidence of how a city is repeatedly made and remade. The museum lists two opening times, 11:00 and 12:00, with free admission by advance registration.
An annual exhibition built around a city in motion
The Tel Aviv–Yafo City Museum describes City on Troubled Waters as its new annual exhibition, curated by Nir Harmat. It brings together 22 artists to observe urban life through the materials and traces that make up the city, ranging from architecture and the street to infrastructure, the sea, the body and the archive. The opening is scheduled for Friday, 13 November, at the museum’s Bialik Street address. The museum’s event listing gives two start times, 11:00 and 12:00, and says admission is free with advance registration.
The opening is designed as an event as well as a gallery visit. The museum says visitors will be able to move through the exhibition and then hear live music on its rooftop from DJ Itamar Shlomo Cohen, with a cool drink offered as part of the gathering. The event page places the opening within the “Loving Art, Making Art” programme. The Craft & Art Association in Israel identifies Harmat as an independent curator and researcher of visual and material culture.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters | Exhibition Opening · City on Troubled Waters · About Us – עמותת אמנים יוצרים בישראל
Memory written into buildings and streets
The exhibition’s curatorial text begins from the idea that a city is continually overwritten. A new building occupies the site of an earlier one; demolition debris may be removed, but the memory of what stood there can remain. The museum says the city’s past is carried not only in monuments or official records but also in buildings, street layouts, infrastructure and the movement of bodies. Private stories, in this account, join the larger urban narrative rather than sitting outside it. The curatorial text says the city’s history continues to operate both on its surface and beneath it.
The museum’s description presents Tel Aviv–Yafo as a place built around repeated beginnings, but never on empty ground. It says the land already held memories, lives and traces before the city’s modern development, and frames the city’s history through cycles of construction and erasure, vision and disillusionment, belonging and displacement. The curatorial text says the title’s “troubled waters” point to deep social and political currents and persistent instability; home, memory and identity shift within that movement.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters
Materials become a record of urban change
The museum describes the artists as working with matter that can carry the city’s history in unexpected ways: Styrofoam made to resemble stone, broken tiles washed up by the sea, threads used to trace memory, water moving below streets and archival images brought into the present. The curatorial text names collecting, dismantling, repairing and assembling as the actions through which the city is recreated. These are not just metaphors in the exhibition statement; they point to the physical processes and materials used in the listed works.
The published work list shows a broad mix of forms rather than a single medium. It includes video and sound, painting, photography, sculpture, mixed-media installations and site-specific objects. Emi Sfard’s House Number 27, for example, is listed as a video installation combining wallpaper, digital drawings and animation. Danielle Feldhaker’s Eddy II is described as a site-specific object made with plastic pipes and copper connectors, while Hagar Cygler’s installation uses embroidery thread and glue.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters
Adva Kremer turns the sea into a constructed image
One of the works identified by the museum is Adva Kremer’s A Piece of Sea, dated 2026. The exhibition list gives its media as mosaic, print and an installation made from PVC sheets. In the museum’s separate profile of Kremer, the work is described as using industrial PVC sheets of the kind used to line swimming pools. The sheets carry printed images of water or generic mosaic patterns, producing the appearance of depth and movement on a flat, stable surface.
Kremer’s process, as the museum explains it, involves breaking the material into small units or “pixels” and manually reassembling them as a mosaic. The work considers the difference between the sea as an open, changing space and the controlled image of water in a swimming pool. The museum says the resulting structure treats the sea as a mediated space, where representation stands in for direct encounter. That description makes the material choice central: the work is built from a product designed to contain and regulate water.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters · Adva Kremer · אדוה קרמר | פיסה של ים, 2026
A city museum, not a single-event memorial
The exhibition sits within a museum whose stated remit is to collect and present the city’s intangible heritage as well as its built history. Its broader public description says the city continually produces cultural, social and historical layers, and that the museum seeks to engage with urban life in neighbourhoods, streets, parks and community centres.
The opening takes place in a city and country still carrying the physical and social consequences of war. A central Tel Aviv apartment block damaged by an Iranian missile in March 2026 was only ready to welcome residents again after repairs in September, according to The Jewish Chronicle. The museum’s published description, however, does not identify the exhibition as a direct account of that conflict or of any single military event. It keeps the focus on the longer urban processes of instability, memory, home and displacement.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters · Tel Aviv-Yafo City Museum after Shoshana and Zevulun Tomer Open Call for Proposals for the Annual Exhibition 2026 · Home - City Museum · Newly built Tel Aviv apartment block hit Iranian missile finally welcomes residents after repairs
Opening details and the difference between free entry and admission
The exhibition was announced in a Zman Tel Aviv article published on 3 November, which reported the 13 November opening, the curator and the advance-registration arrangement. The museum’s current event page confirms the address as 27 Bialik Street and lists 11:00 and 12:00 as the opening times. It also says the event is part of “Loving Art, Making Art”. The museum’s listing does not provide a confirmed number of places remaining in either time slot, so free admission should not be read as a guarantee of walk-in access.
The museum’s visitor-information page lists ordinary admission at NIS 40 for a regular ticket. That standard price is separate from the opening arrangement: the 13 November event is advertised as free, provided visitors register in advance. The museum also says ordinary tickets are purchased digitally. For readers planning to attend, the practical distinction is simple: the free opening is a specific event with registration, while NIS 40 is the published regular admission price for a normal museum visit.
Sources: City on Troubled Waters | Exhibition Opening · Visit Information · תערוכה חדשה במוזיאון העיר תל אביב-יפו תיפתח בנובמבר ותעסוק בזיכרון העירוני
