“Mixed Emotions” reflected a fundamental change in the understanding and treatment of emotions in contemporary culture. The works in this exhibition are preoccupied with a wide range of human emotions – from the most positive to the most negative ones – as they are represented in local and international art; they point to the status of emotions as a central theme, which challenges an increasingly large number of artists to examine it. The exhibition highlights the representation of human emotions marginalized by the modernist ethos, and is thus concerned with shifts that have taken place in art from the late 1980s to the present moment.

For many years, the human psyche was perceived in terms of an antithesis between cognition and emotion. It was argued that the human capacity for reasoning was imprinted in the brain, while emotion was a lowlier and more primitive faculty imprinted in the body. Emotions were thus perceived as mysterious, largely unforeseeable phenomena, which could not be rationalized. More recently, following the development of scientific research on emotions and the rediscovery of the importance of emotion in cognitive processes, there has occurred a fundamental change in social, cultural and scientific perceptions of emotion. The new understandings of emotion that stem from these discoveries tend to undo the hierarchy between mind and body, and therefore to blur the binary contrast between cognition and emotion.

These changes have also resonated in the field of art making, where they are given expression through an intensive preoccupation with emotions. The desire to give visual expression, and sometimes even physical texture, to a range of emotions is what weaves together the different narrative threads of which “Mixed Emotions” is composed. The preoccupation with emotions raises challenging questions about representation and interpretation: is it at all possible to represent emotions and mental states? Are works about emotions necessarily emotional? Do conceptual approaches contradict the preoccupation with emotion? Is it possible to separate emotion from authenticity?

The richness and complexity of emotional expressions in art touches upon every domain of life – from the most intimate to the social and political. The thematic structure of the exhibition, which reflects this complexity, is divided into five parts:Emotion/Language, which reflects the manner in which words become carriers of emotion; The Body Language of Emotion, which reflects the physical, externalized manifestations of emotion; Adolescent Angst and Romantic Love, which reflects contemporary values from a mostly critical, doubtful stance;Emotions in Familial and Parental Relationships, which points to the intimate and complex expression of emotions in relationships; and finally, Collective Emotions in Israeli Political Reality, which reflect the emotionally intense nature of ideological beliefs and charged events.

It seems that even if the works in the exhibition sometimes express “calculated,” artificial emotions, which are amplified and consciously made to fit certain representational conventions – at times refuting the very ability to feel and express “authentic” emotions – it nevertheless seems that they have the power to awaken in us intense emotions and real experiences.