Special to WJW

Is it possible to celebrate a country's achievements without it turning into a public relations stunt? Israeli artists think so, and their works appear in what is being hailed as the largest exhibit of its kind in the District.

In honor of the Jewish state's 60th birthday, at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in the District is exhibiting more than 50 artworks by 15 Israeli artists in Personal Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Israel.

"This is definitely the largest Israeli art show that has been exhibited in D.C. in the past few years," said Tamar Mayer, director of cultural affairs at the Israeli Embassy. "I don't know of any other exhibition in this scale, and so it is indeed extremely exciting."

The exhibit, which is on view Tuesday through May 18, represents a collaboration of the Katzen Center, the Embassy of Israel, the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel, and A.U.'s Center for Israel Studies.

The embassy has been involved in the exhibit for more than a year and helped fund the expenses of shipping the artwork from Israel to Washington, according to Mayer. The embassy also "provided support" and helped initiate contact between the Katzen Center and the Herzliya Museum, she added.

Funded by a grant from the Cohen Foundation, Jack Rasmussen, the Katzen's director and curator, and Russell Stone, director of the Center for Israel Studies, traveled in December to Israel, where they met with Dalia Levin, director of the Herzliya Museum. Together, the three visited museums, galleries and artists' studios to choose artwork for the exhibit.

They focused on "the next generation of artists, who need exposure," Rasmussen said, though he hesitated to use the word "emerging," since some of the artists are more established than others.

Although the show is a birthday celebration, Rasmussen said the artists are responding to the world they see around themselves, rather than speaking for Israel. "This is definitely not a P.R. piece," he insisted.

Several of the pieces in the show may be considered controversial. Miki Kratsman's photographs, taken with a plastic toy camera, depict concrete shelters and security walls that are designed to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks, but also turn all of Israel into a shelter.

Shai Azoulay's "night paintings," which he created while standing on his balcony listening to back-and-forth shootings and bombings between Jerusalem and a small Palestinian village that reminded him of his military service in Lebanon, show the "beauty and terror of the night."

Yael Bartana's video, Kings of the Hill, uses the image of a car continually scaling and rescaling a mound of sand on the beach in Tel Aviv as a metaphor for the "power and success" of the "ideal values" of the "secular Zionist enterprise," whose "generous and cruel hero" carries the motto: "Either conquer the hill or die."

Another exhibit may be a metaphor for Isaiah's quote about turning swords into plowshares. Eli Gur Arie's "Magnets" is a mixed media sculpture of an elongated gun curved into an unclosed circle. "I think it may be as simple as making something beautiful out of a weapon of war. I read where he was interested in 'presenting civil implementations of military technologies,' " Rasmussen said.

"I show a lot of political work. That's something I am drawn to," Rasmussen admitted, citing an exhibit he curated at the Katzen last spring on artists from Northern Ireland, who frequently mixed politics into their works. "There's no way to avoid it," he said.

Levin agreed some of the works are political, but said they "usually deal with universal subjects such as human rights or social justice." She said Israeli artists, like artists of other countries, "do not create in a vacuum. They are influenced on several levels by the complexity of the social and political reality in Israel."

Many of the artists study in the United States and Europe and become exposed to the international art scene. "Naturally this infuses the Israeli art with multicultural qualities, and it cannot really be identified as Jewish art concerned with religious or local politics alone," she said.

"There is a lot of politics, and a lot of ambiguity, too," Rasmussen said. His example of the ambiguity? "Shai Azoulay. It's hard to say where he is politically."

Personal Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Israel will be on display at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in the District Tuesday through May 18. The free exhibit is open Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Information is available by calling 202-885-1300.