One Two Mix Meeting Point

Meeting Point is a series of exhibitions that seeks to articulate a space of dialogue between lecturers of the Bezalel Department of Fine Arts and its graduates. It is an open site for encounters between positions, languages, and material gestures, crossing both generational fields and fields of practice.

The series opens with a joint exhibition by Ido Bar-El and Shalom Hai, One Two Mix.

Prof. Ido Bar-El is a painter, a graduate of the Bezalel Department of Fine Arts, and a senior lecturer there. He served as head of the department from 2003 to 2011. Shalom Hai is a multidisciplinary artist, a graduate of the Department of Fine Arts (2022) and of the MFA program (2025) at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem.

At the core of the dialogue proposed by the exhibition operates a dialectic of play as a dual conceptual mechanism: on the one hand, a practice of reorganization, a reading of a system through its tools; on the other, an internal action that operates from within the conditions the system itself enables, in order to bypass, destabilize, or suspend what appears to be inherent and fixed within it.

This is not a move that undermines the rules of the game, but one that works along their seams, activating their language in order to expose their limits: the game stabilizes conditions; playfulness destabilizes them.

The works in the exhibition emerged from an archive of materials originating in the everyday, functional sphere: tarpaulins, Plexiglas, motorcycle headlights, panes of glass, a ping-pong table, and industrial objects. The material does not function as a neutral substrate for artistic action, but as a charged site carrying layers of use, function, and temporality. Playfulness is not detached from the material but arises from it, as a response to the functional load it bears.

The painterly action (spray, pigment, varnish, or another material gesture) operates within the substrate, negotiating with a space that already carries meaning. In this sense, the material does not enter into the game but becomes, paradoxically, the structure of the game itself.

Like its title, the exhibition adopts an open count of action: one – a move of distinction; two – the establishment of a relation; mix – the count itself destabilizes and loses its stability.