we are winding, twisted.

we need winding and twisted ways

for us to travel straight.

you can develop habits of mediocrity

just by doing what is required.

creation should be new every time:

new in relation to the chaos that is there.

chaos is new all the time.

it is renewed every night.

creation must be re-born

with the new light

with the new dawn.

new every day.

but yesterday's standard is becoming

a part of today's chaos.

a strange alien language.

needing footnotes, explanations.

a rich forest of misunderstandings.

start again the new road at dawn.

yesterday's road has led

to yesterday's destination.

today is a new chaos.

a new journey. a new city.

needing new paths. and new standards.

This excerpt from a poem by Ben Okri aptly expresses my aims in the ‘One Hundred Sunrises a Day’ exhibition and what motivates me as a curator: to reimagine my city, the role of art in my society and the public discourse about identity politics in my language.

In our exhibition the city and society within it are both undergoing art therapy to treat identities in crisis.

The strategic approach is nostalgic futurology. By winding ways we travelled through time, between past and future, and searched for ‘the new city’. Municipal notice boards – abandoned in favour of sponsored advertising on social media and left bare outdoors, for us to ignore on our way to the corner store – now take on the new role of an open urban gallery. The city is expanding its scope of operation – beyond sewage, parking and fireworks – to the spirit and soul of the society residing within it. The future here is made up of the past, just rearranged. Movement in the public space is also going back to the future: notice boards invite passers by to pause, to linger, to be curious and to turn their gaze from the tiny screen to the street around them.

Art is a connecting thread here between the city and identity, and it too faced fundamental questions. This exhibition did not come out of the museum. It never visited there in the first place. It was created for the public sphere, out of reflection on aesthetics and the discussions we'd like to develop on this vital platform. We didn't icopy-paste an exhibition from overseas or some gallery. We curated it from what was missing in the urban sphere.

And what's missing in this lovely city of ours are narratives, names and expression by sections of the population who weren't sitting at the table when the names of streets and squares were allocated. In March 2021 my city Haifa changed not only because art appeared in spaces dedicated for advertisements. The city changed because it gave room and attention to faces and voices that do not take up space in the public sphere.

The social identity we've investigated in the exhibition also moved in winding ways: from Beta Israel to Afrofuturism, from Ethiopian Jewry to Ethio-Israelis, or just Blackness. No self-definition repeated itself among the artists taking part in the exhibition. We embraced this Rashomon of versions along the range of artistic styles and techniques, and attempted to reflect this complexity in the collection of artworks. Perhaps not coincidentally the title of the exhibition sounds like a collection of short stories. This exhibition does not represent, it tells stories.

These three strands – the city, identity and art – have roamed together not just through time but in the great wide world. The city has compared itself to Tel Aviv, to Berlin, to Beirut or to Cape Town, depends who you ask. The identity strolled between the villages of Ethiopia, the camps of Sudan, absorption centres, housing projects and the demonstrations in Minnesota to the Hollywood future in which black superheroes are just superheroes. And art, inspired by movements such as South African #rhodesmustfall and American For Freedoms, has returned to its sources in a new riding hood, to serve as an essential tool for social reconstruction.

The result is an experiment. What would happen if.

The result is a protest. It says what's sick of not being said.

The result is a research. It sets out to learn and to explore.

David Harvey wrote, 'The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.'

I've changed while curating change in my city. I've learned a lot about the society I live in, my profession and the opportunities treasured within it. I've changed stances, come to understand processes differently. I presume every one who laboured over this exhibition changed in the process,even if just a little bit. Because as Harvey goes on to write, the right to the city is a common rather than an individual right, ‘since transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.'

I am full of gratitude for the people who walked by my side down this new road at dawn. As Ben Okri expressed so well, ours was a winding and twisted path. Creation is also renewal, an emergence from the familiar, and it's challenging because we're used to holding onto the familiar even when it's not working. In the process of working on the exhibition we grappled with the need to redefine the rules of the game between us, a game we all took far too seriously. Only thanks to the meeting between us – the artists, municipality, the third sector and businesses – and thanks to the joy of creation that flowed behind the scenes, was a path paved to something so surreal, so necessary and so wonderful, like one hundred sunrises a day.

There's no other option but to end with a quote from a song by Nina Simone:

There's a brand new mornin'
Rising clear and sweet and free
There's a new day dawning
That belongs to you and me

Yes a new world's comin'
You know the one I'm talking about
The one we'd had visions of
And it's comin' in peace, coming in joy
Comin' in love

Valeria Geselev,
Curator