780 catalogues. Six decades. One evolving field of memory.
Curator: Orna Granot & Britt Lavi
Design: Lila Chitayat
For the 60th anniversary of the Israel Museum of Art, I designed an installation that gathers every catalogue ever published — from the very first exhibition to today. In this installation, each decade was shaped like a letter or like an architectural plan of the museum itself. The grid gives equality to every catalogue, while the height variations create the sense of a garden — something you can wander inside. The ‘covers’ of the books become the art pieces and with this order can create new interconnections. The display manages to give a visual overview to changes that accrued through time in the themes of exhibitions, the typography, the colors and the linearity of 60 years of work. This is a spatial catalogue of all catalogues!
I was interested in turning something normally kept on a shelf into a spatial experience.
Organized decade by decade, the catalogues form a spatial archive you can walk through. Each book has an equal place in the grid, yet together they create a landscape of history.
This field of catalogues is also a field of people — curators, artists, designers, researchers, visitors. For 60 years, they shaped the museum’s story through exhibitions, and each catalogue became part of that memory.
The wall for the last decade continues like a carpet, with extra empty space left open — for future exhibitions still to come.
I think about how archives live on, and how design can give them form.
Why do we still need spatial experiences in a digital world?
For the Israel Museum of Art’s 60th anniversary, I created an installation that transforms 60 years of catalogues into a walkable archive. Arranged in a linear timeline, the design reveals how graphic styles, color palettes, and contexts have shifted over decades.
But more than that — it turns the catalogue into a field you can enter with your body. Visitors wander through a vast “catalogue of catalogues,” spread across the entire gallery, experiencing history not just as pages, but as space.
