"The Reversing pot" is a social art project that was developed into an exhibition held within a high school classroom. The project aimed to reverse the existing order in the educational system, turning the chairs and tables upside down and transforming the classroom into a studio, gallery, and home.
Once a week for three months, artists Mayan Mozes and Rotem Volk met with students of Ort Melton High School in Bat Yam, some of whom were refugees from Ukraine who had arrived in the country just a few months earlier. Together, they discussed life and the experiences they had been through, observed and experimented with art, explored new perspectives on reality and ventured from the core lessons into a new world of images and new means of expression.
In contrast to the social-cultural uniformity that has been prevalent in Israel for many years, referred to as the "melting pot," this project was a reverse melting pot. Instead of blurring identities and the places from which the students originated, the artists aimed to encourage the multiplicity of identities within the group and provide space for each one to express themselves.
All the artworks presented in the exhibition were created by the students themselves, as a result of the collaborative process centered around the sensitive and loaded topic of "home."
This project connected movements and spaces, bridging physical and metaphorical lines between cultures and countries, between the gome left behind and the new one to build. In the end, it became an exhibition that embodied movement - movement of change, lands, and migration, transitions between the home left behind and the new home and school, transitions between memories and the everyday.
The project was created as part of The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Artist Incubator for Excellency in Musrara School for Art and Society.
Part of the artifacts were later presented in Musrara’s Social Gallery, Jerusalem in the exhibition “Four Beats”.
Project concept, development, and mentoring : Mayan Mozes Platnic and Rotem Volk.
Participating creators: Students of the 9th Grade, Ort Melton, Bat Yam,
Curator: Ayelet Hashachar HaCohen,
Cultural mediation and translation: Anna Gani
School team: Yosefa Rosenbach, Michal Benhus and Roza Yacobson.
Photos: Yael Schmidt