Image: CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo
CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo is presenting 'Nardeen Srouji: A sole cypress' from June 18 to August 29, 2026, in the Rachel and Israel Pollak Gallery at its Tel Aviv-Yafo site. The exhibition spans two gallery floors and brings together a site-responsive installation, embroidered works on metal, and additional sculptural interventions that take the center’s building and its surroundings as their point of departure.
According to the exhibition text, the project begins with the two cypress trees in the entrance plaza and with the center’s postmodern metal structure. Through those forms, Srouji examines the ground beneath the institution and the historical, political, social and physical layers around it, including houses, building materials, erased neighborhoods, traces embedded in the landscape, ornamental patterns and vegetation. The exhibition is curated by Hila Cohen-Schneiderman and Yael Messer.
On the first floor, Srouji presents a reconstruction of the building’s facade inserted into the gallery space, tilted on its side like an architectural remnant, temporary set, or unfinished or collapsed structure. The work’s light industrial materiality is linked in the exhibition text to Haret al-Tanak, a shanty district that stood between Maneshiya and Kerem HaTeimanim until the mid-20th century near what is now a parking area by the Carmel Market. The second floor is devoted to a body of embroidery works mounted on metal supports resembling mashrabiyas, drawn from another architectural element of the building: sun screens installed along the stairwell.
The artist’s embroidery has, in recent years, engaged traditional Palestinian patterns as coded visual systems carrying information about origin, family affiliation, economic status and sometimes age or marital condition. In this presentation, however, those patterns are not transferred nostalgically onto fabric. Instead, Srouji stretches, fragments, disrupts and reassembles them on industrial panels and within the building itself, making the language feel at once renewed and structurally exposed. The exhibition text also notes that the new series takes as a starting point the cypress motif in Palestinian embroidery and in the urban symbolism of Jaffa.
The cypress is described in the exhibition as a sign of place and boundary, and as an image that recurs in Palestinian textiles in multiple variations. The curatorial text connects the tree to Mahmoud Darwish’s poem 'The Broken Cypress', which describes a fallen tree on the road while life continues around it. In the exhibition, collapse is framed less as a single dramatic event than as a continuing process: the building facade leans toward failure while the embroidery proceeds slowly and repetitively, seeking to stitch, repair and build an image that is both old and new.
The exhibition was realized with the support of the Rivkind Ben Tzur Grant for Art, Education and Community, with additional support from the Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Arts. The center’s website also notes that a group of young artist trainees and art-school students and graduates worked with Srouji on the embroidery works. Public visiting hours are listed as Monday to Thursday, 2 pm to 7 pm, and Friday to Saturday, 10 am to 2 pm, with admission at 20 shekels.
The exhibition arrives alongside other CCA programming tied to the institution’s video archive. On August 12, 2026, the center will host 'Annotated Screening | Contemplating the Grid', an evening organized around the concept of the grid and its appearance in video art. The program, presented by artist Mohammed Touhi and curated by Luma Abu Wardeh, includes an annotated screening of works by Doron Solomons, Ofri Cnaani, Nardeen Srouji and Tina Yakob, with reference to critical theory and to the work of Hito Steyerl and Mona Hatoum. CCA also lists archive-video viewing of Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kafr Bir'im’s 2009 video work 'Without Vow' from July 4 to August 30, 2026.
