In recent years, we at the Institute for Public Presence have become aware of the existence of original materials and a variety of media works that were primarily created beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, and found in the homes of artists or family estates. These materials are often kept in inadequate conditions: inaccessible, suffering the ravages of time and sometimes even lost entirely.
The purpose of the Public Art and Early Media Archive is to save such materials before they are ruined or lost and to make them accessible to researchers, curators and the general public both in Israel and abroad. Among other things, documentary materials and sound and film components of some of the earliest and most important conceptual works in the field of Israeli art are currently kept by the archive, such as the estate of Ezra Orion, the films of Yair Garbuz, the performances and documentation of Adina Bar-On, documentations of the Tel-Hai events, sound recordings by Gerard Marx and others. A significant number of these works are relevant both to local and international history, particularly as relating to the development of localism and globalism in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as high points in the development of visual art in Israel.
The Public Art and Early Media Archive’s activities join those of the CDA’s Video Archive, which was established in 2006 and currently includes over 4,500 titles.
Hagar Cygler, director of the Archives since 2018
Udi Edelman, initiated and established, 2017
Public Art and Early Media Archive is supported by Artis and Mifal HaPais.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
