Dekel Harari –a single Exhibition 19/5 – 20/6/2026 ,Global Art Gallery , Tel Aviv
I work with newspapers. Not for what's written in them, and not because they're free - but for what they do. The newspaper is the most everyday material there is: it arrives, gets read, gets thrown out, and tomorrow another one will arrive just like it. It is routine itself, printed.
In my work, I give it a different job. Instead of reading and discarding, I cut, paint, and build. Headlines become background, images become texture, and the words - written to be read once and forgotten - remain. They accumulate. They become a layer.
The exhibition moves between two axes.
The first axis deals with the erosion of identity in the face of information overload. Figures without faces, faces dissolving into text, bodies absorbed by the background. We think we are thinking. We feel we are feeling. We believe we are choosing. But the same newspaper in the morning, the same scroll on the phone, the same route to work - actions repeated until consciousness learns to perform them without asking. Over time, habit becomes identity.
The second axis enters the headlines themselves. I take an article, an event, a moment that passed through the news - and translate it into an image, the way it echoes in me. Wars, threats, escalations - things that happen again and again until they sound almost like the weather. Within this repetition, even shock erodes and becomes part of the background.
In these works, I try to give the image its weight back. To take moments that have already passed through us, and let them stick. Not as news - but as an image that remains.
Peace takes the form of a weapon, a threat takes the shape of an anemone, and the line between growth and destruction blurs.
The title dd/mmm/yyyy of this solo exhibition is an empty date format. A placeholder - the promise of the newspaper and of the everyday: that tomorrow there will be another day, with more headlines, with more information flowing through us without our stopping.
I ask you to pause, to look, to think. I know that's a lot to ask of a newspaper.
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Dekel Harari is a contemporary mixed-media artist, working primarily with newspapers as raw material. His work explores the tension between information, routine, and identity - the moment in which a daily action ceases to be a choice and becomes a habit, and the way information overload shapes, and at times conceals, the human presence within it.
Before turning to art, Harari came from a business background - a structured organizational environment in which data precedes intuition. His move into artistic practice grew out of a personal need to stop, lift his head, and ask the questions that have no KPI.
In his work, the newspaper serves as both material and symbol. Not as a source of news, but as a surface that frames reality and at times obscures the person within it. Through layers of material, paint, and image, Harari examines the question of who we are before we are exposed to information - and who we become afterward.
Opening – Wednesday 20/5 2000 Evening
Curators – Michali Adler and Dr. Galia Duchin Arieli
