The Negev Museum of Art – Until 28 February 2026

The Negev Museum of Art is proud to present the exhibition Ronit Porat: Night Wood. Ronit Porat is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in photographic collages, juxtaposing photos with archival, historical, artistic, and biographical materials that she extracts from their original context and sets in new ones. She applies the same practice to the exhibition before us, following a stream of consciousness that emanates from two separate springs. The first is the sculpture The Amazon (1915) by Chana Orloff (1888–1968) – an eminent sculptor and one of the central figures of the School of Paris. Orloff formulated a modernist language that infused avant-garde formal simplification with human warmth, and focused on the human figure, particularly women – artists and intellectuals whose portraits became representations of a new, modern femininity. The Amazon, which references the ancient myth of female warriors who lived outside male-dominated society, symbolized modern and independent femininity in the present tense and hinted at a deep kinship between women, manifested in shared inspiration and strength, like the sisterhood that formed around Orloff’s studio. The second point of departure, which also inspired the exhibition’s title, is the 1936 book Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). A masterpiece of 20th century literary modernism, the provocative book recounts a complicated, tragic, and passionate relationship between two women, set against the backdrop of love and loneliness in Paris’s dark nightlife between the two World Wars.

Link to the Exhibition