Yara Kassem Mahajena: Highway 65
Bread & Roses Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
Beit HaBe'er Cultural Center, Tel Aviv, Israel
November 6 2025 - December 20, 2025
The exhibition Highway 65 by Yara Kassem Mahajena unfolds simultaneously across two art spaces in Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Bread and Roses Gallery and Beit HaBe'er. The two parts of the exhibition opened on consecutive days and are presented in parallel. The exhibition features installations, sculpture, robotics, painting, ceramics, and more. The titles Home and Garden—corresponding to the works on display in each venue—deconstruct and reassemble the portrait of a displaced home, through presence and absence.
This two-part exhibition is the result of a years-long artistic process in which Mahajena traced possible forms of resistance among animals to the occupation and appropriation of land—whether as endangered species or invasive ones. At its core lies the inner experience of uprooting and exile. As a third-generation descendant of Palestinian refugees—of destruction, longing, and hope—Mahajena now faces the possibility of becoming a refugee herself and losing the home in which she grew up. The emotional, political, and existential space-time of this condition is populated by objects, human figures, and animals, all seeking their way through unfamiliar surroundings.
At Bread and Roses Gallery – Highway 65 (Home) – the gallery space transforms into the interior of a home, where functional robots scurry about like restless pets. What appears to be an active, living present is saturated with traces of the past, urging the viewer to position themselves and decide upon their relationship to the elements of the home and its inhabitants. At Beit HaBe'er – Highway 65 (Garden) – the historic structure, once a water source for the Jaffa orchards, becomes adorned with colorful Islamic ornamentation, upon which animals emerge in various scenes blending nature and humanity in delicate, unexpected ways.
Mahajena articulates the questions that guided her throughout the creation of the exhibition: “Who holds power? Who is granted the right to exist? What can we carry with us, and what must we leave behind? How does the past continue to shape the future? What, if anything, remains predictable in times of instability? Who and what accompany a person and offer companionship? What is the meaning of compassion and care within the experience of displacement? And finally, what are ownership and belonging?”
